by Andrea Helm
Today I went to my friendly Capitol Hill post office to get change-of-address forms. Last week I had gone to my friendly Capitol Hill post office to get change-of-address forms, but the doors lock at five o'clock and change-of-address forms are always locked inside, so today I was in line for my second attempt to change my address.
I look through the post-office supplies table conveniently located within lounging distance of the queue, but there were no change-of-address forms there. I stand in line and wait almost 20 minutes tick tick tick am I gonna be late returning to work because this is my lunch hour and I get just that, an hour, tick tick tick the guy in front of me is even more impatient and pissed; he's fueling my aggravation at having to wait for the clerk to tell the STUPID woman one more time that express service is not overnight guaranteed it's two-day delivery ma'am tick tick tick is the sound of a bomb getting ready to blow is the sound of the clock is the sound of my hating, sound of my waiting.
I get up to the counter and request two change-of address forms; the clerk hands me two from a stack on the counter in front of him.
Those insidious little change-of-address forms were there the whole time - I could have walked up, no waiting, gotten as many as my little heart desired - but they were lying flat with no indication that they were indeed change of address forms.
I leave. For the the third time in two weeks I find myself thinking that if I had a gun, all the stupid people would shut up. I can almost understand the national epidemic
where "disgruntled former post-office employees" walk into their former disgruntled place of employment and blow the guts out of their former disgruntled employees and everybody else with a big gun. Sound of a bomb getting ready to blow. I'm even worried just being in a post office these days. Jeez, I ... My name is Andrea and I have Post-Office Traumatic Stress Syndrome. Not to panic, though - I'm sure there's a government program for this affliction.
Waiting for the bus to go back to work (which by this time doesn't seem like such a crummy place after all), I see a scuzzy-looking junkie dude picking his mainline scabs with grime-blackened fingernails - on Broadway in broad daylight. Somebody shoulda told him you can get a darned good case of impetigo doing that.
Mere hours later, on the way home, my bus makes the stop before mine. I look out the window and notice a young woman waiting at the bus stop with an enormous armload of loose papers. She moves wrong; half her pile falls and scatters. She begins to cry. The bus driver closes the door and pulls away.
The woman loses it. Fists clenched, jumping up and down, she screams, "Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you!" The scene takes all of five seconds to transpire. A blind bus passenger, missing the visuals, asks the bus driver what that was all about, so we're all treated to a verbal play-by-play. "I don't know what her problem is, but we don't need it on the bus." Thanks, bus driver, for a most eloquent summary of the entire day.
Next stop, mine. I'm walking home, thinking about the scab-picker, the woman's angry explosion; I'm thinking about which can to open for dinner; I'm thinking about the decline of civilization (as I so often do these days). I decide not to analyze too much because I know, soon as this day oozes into the next, that some comic, eerie logic will come and spare me introspection.
Andrea Helm is a Free Press news editor.
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Contents on this page were published in the July/August, 1993 edition of the Washington Free Press.
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Copyright © 1993 WFP Collective, Inc.