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Let’s be honest. This is everywhere you go. Every morning, millions of people in your vicinity wake up, discover that their brain is broken, they no longer know left from right, can’t complete a sentence, forgot how to count to four, lost all concept of the physical space they occupy, and say to themselves, “Yes, today I shall go out and engage in commerce!”
Whenever I’m driving and someone does something really stupid, I’ve started saying to myself “don’t be mad, cut them some slack, it’s clearly their first day driving.” I started saying it as a joke, but honestly it seems pretty accurate most of the time.
Edit: I shared this with a friend and she responded
My sister and I text each other OWIHTP when we are behind someone who waits for their entire set of groceries to be scanned and bagged and loaded and suddenly realizes they will have to pay for these food stuffs and only then begins searching for a method of payment. It means “Oh, wait, I have to pay.” Happens waaaay too often.
I have a theory for why OWIHTP happens: Shopping is exhausting. Having to process all the products in the store, minding the shopping list, and what you’ve picked up already and what you need to pick up what isn’t on the list, deciding between alternatives and sometimes reorganizing big chunks of the list because what you wanted to get isn’t available – is immensely draining.
When you’re at checkout and don’t have anything to do mentally, you give the brain a rest it gladly accepts.
Yeah, and at the end of the day, we’re all just bags of meat with electricity flowing through us. It’s amazing we’ve made it this far.
Person enters behind you… you immediately forget what you came to the post office for.
That was actually me a month or two ago. Had literally never been in a post office, and started with “yeah, I have never been here, and don’t know what I’m doing or if I’m supposed to be prepared”
I’m sure I was his favorite interaction.
I want to send this letter here to xyz.
clerk: This needs a envelope.
Yeah, please add one.
clerk: that’s not my job.
…what is your job then?
And they only sell them 10 a piece.
I check for envelopes! The buying envelopes line is over there.
Probability would seem to indicate that there are those who frequent the PO more often than others, and that the use of the PO by average people is declining.
This, in turn, would cause me to guess that there are PO “power users” who, frequenting the PO more than others, are more likely to come in to contact with those who can count on one hand the decades it’s been since they last even thought about a PO.
Assuming any of this to be true, it appears as though Michael has just just now noticed this.
Your actually not far off. The power users are mostly just businesses and government offices. I know because I work for a major print company in my area and we actually have a mail department in our building that uses the Post Office 3-5x per day, not including our own delivery service, fed-ex, ups, etc. We also work with a lot of other businesses in the area and government print work, and use the PO constantly. During our Political Season, they will actually cut us off after a point and simply tell us they can only send so much mail by a certain date.
Well if I’m left with no option but to go to the counter at the post office it’s precisely because I have no idea how to do what I want with online resources.
E.g. post a flat cardboard package containing art that I made myself to a foreign country. The envelope sizes they sell at USPS stores don’t match the rates they post on their website. Often, the clerk can help a little bit with filling the customs form. The website says that you need a license to export art to foreign countries, the clerk doesn’t.
Stop blaming other people, start blaming the system: we need more clerks, better payed and better trained clerks.
For what it’s worth, I think I’ve been to a post office maybe 3 times in my entire life. Only once as an adult, it’s not exactly a common occurrence in my life lol
As someone older than the internet, going to the PO was a monthly (if not weekly) occurance growing up.
But I’ve only been a handful of times in the last X decades, and frankly avoid it at all costs.
It’s never a fun experience, thoughy local PO is staffed by nice folks.
I just much prefer picking up my packages at a automated delivery box, rather than going to a post office lol :3. More convenient
The only times I’d need to go to the post office is if something can’t be delivered by my preferred methods… or if I was sending mail, which probably is not happening in the near future :3
You’ll love my town then, because the exact same things can be said about some of the people working at my local post office.
Fortunately, the post office in the next town away is close enough to be an option for me and the employees there are, at least in my experience, all friendly and knowledgeable despite being over worked and under paid.
Where I used to live, the DMV was like that. When I got married, my wife moved to my state, and brought her car. She had the hardest time getting it registered in our state. It was like the DMV had never encountered this situation before. We went there several times, and each time they rejected what the last person told us to bring, and demanded a different document, so we’d go home for that one. Eventually, someone asked again for the first document, and we were at the beginning again.
So one day, I decided to try a different DMV office, and I was in and out in 15 minutes, with the car registered in my state.
It seemed that the Republican state had decided to privatize the DMV, and sold each office to a different “franchisee,” to manage as they please. Clearly the first one we went to was doing a terrible job, while the other one, 10 miles away, was operated competently.
We moved to a different state several years later, where the DMV is amazingly efficient. It never takes me longer than 30 minutes, and most of that is waiting. When I hear jokes about the inefficiency of the DMV, I think they should check out ours.
That’s me, sorry. Every time I find myself at the post office I suddenly have no idea why I’m there or what I’m doing. Sure, I need to send or receive something… But how?!
People manage to do that at the supermarket. Either that or they walk up to the cashier and ask: “Excuse me, what’s the most complex transaction I can possibly engage in with you?”
It’s always fun when they open up another register and wave everyone over because they can see that this one customer probably won’t be finished within the next five minutes.
Missing the weirdly-dressed Boomer who clearly has been in a post office before, and has unreasonable expectations, but also doesn’t seem to know anything about how this post office works, and has questions and needs something special from the back.
Well personally ive only been actually inside the post office to do something like 6 times in my life, and im in my 30’s, its always something new too. Sorry if i hold yall up
I was thinking the exact opposite thing, but about the people behind me…
Why do you need to think for 30 seconds about which lottery numbers to pick. You’re not winning, grandma. I’ve been carrying 3 2L bottles without a basket while standing in this line for the past 5 minutes and I’m ready to kill.
The best is when people hold up the line because they are buying scratch offs, scratching off the barcode, scanning them, and getting more.
Or it’s after 5pm or on the weekend and made up exclusively of old people who could go any time during the week.
Who’s to say they aren’t there every day of the week? They need their daily exercise.
