The Modernish Father

I had originally planned to write about something else, but that will have to wait. I have been greatly inconvenienced and somewhat offended.

Who has caused me this heinous inconvenience/offense, you ask? Sadly it’s an entity that I usually go out of my way to defend: the United States Postal Service.

One day last week, I needed to buy some stamps. And even though you can get stamps at the grocery store or the bank, I like to go to the post office and buy stamps.

A philatelic obsession

You see, I have an affinity for unusual stamps. The 41-cent flag or “Forever” Liberty Bell stamp will get your letter there, but why would you want one of those dullards when you can get so many other exciting and interesting stamps for the same price? It’s like a little art gallery in the corner of every piece of mail that you send off.

I don’t collect stamps, but I do like getting non-standard ones to slap on the very small number of envelopes that we actually still mail off. I generally try to buy stamps that fall into one of three categories:

• Odd-shaped or obnoxiously large stamps: Jamestown Settlement, U.S. Military Academy
• Things I actually like: Baseball Stadiums, Star Wars
• Stamps that The Wife thinks we have no business buying: Black Heritage, Eid Greetings, Purple Heart, Jury Duty

Naturally, I gravitate towards the last category since my primary goal in life is to embarrass or anger The Wife whenever humanly possible. If she rolls her eyes when I show her the stamps I’ve purchased, I know that I’ve done my job.

Hello… hello… is there anybody in there?

So, I like to buy weirdo stamps. What’s the problem, you ask?

The problem is that the United States Postal Service apparently has a very employee-friendly definition of operating hours. And when I left work a little early the other day to go buy stamps, I couldn’t find an office that was actually open.

Now, it’s not like I live in the sticks where the post office is located in the back corner of a gas station. If that were the case, I’d understand having irregular or very limited operating hours. I live in a city with 82,000 people. It’s right next to a city with another 65,000 people. I work at one of the largest universities in the United States – a campus with not one, but two U.S. post offices.

And yet when I left work at 4:15 p.m. on a Tuesday afternoon, I was unable to find a post office within ten miles that was open.

• Aggieland – The post office in the MSC that features oh-so-convenient operating hours from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. (That’s actually an improvement from my undergrad days, when they didn’t open up shop until noon.)
• Northgate – The other on-campus post office. Closed at 4 p.m.
• Bryan Main – Closes at 4:30 p.m., but I couldn’t make it in time given traffic.
• Bryan Downtown – Also closes at 4:30. Also unreachable in time.
• Wellborn – Closed at 3:15 p.m.

Now, there was technically one post office that was open until 5:00 p.m. The main College Station post office is open until five, but the two “highly motivated” workers behind the counter had a line 30-40 deep going out the door and had stationed a third employee at the end of the line to shoo people away. So for all intents and purposes, they were closed at 4:30 as well.

How is it that in a community of nearly 150,000 people, there’s not a single post office that is fully staffed and open until 5:00 p.m.?

I’m not expecting them to keep extended hours. I was willing to work through lunch and modify my schedule to make it there. I just want them to be open from 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. like the rest of the working world. If a person is able to get to a post office by 4:30 p.m., they should be able to buy a book of stamps.

So that’s how the post office angered me.

(On a side note, I don’t really have a beef with stamp prices. I don’t think I could get a letter from my house to Nome, Alaska in a couple of days for less than 50 cents.)

Fries at the bottom of the bag

• This is just plain wrong.
• The Girl really likes hanging out in her Baby Björn. She also has a new best friend – the lion on her little bouncer chair.
• I had forgotten just how cute genuine baby smiles are.
• The Wife tells me that the check has cleared for The Boy’s tee-ball registration, so we’re guessing he’s signed up. Either that or the local little league really is out to screw me over.
• For those of you wondering, the birds are still convocating behind our house at dusk each evening.
• Pitchers and catchers report in less than 36 hours. Thank the maker baseball is nearly here again.