4449/17368
Shepherd’s Bush green Post Office continues to be one of the most Hell-ish places on earth. I arrived at 5pm today to post one letter. I hoped to use the self-service machines, but they were both switched off and some frazzled looking men were attempting to repair them. So I stood in the long snaking queue for counter service. Only two staff were on duty. It took twenty-five minutes to get to the front of the queue and then things became stuck because a very apologetic young woman was trying to post a box to America that contained some perfume and liquids and so needed to remove those before she could send on the other stuff and a much less apologetic mother was seemingly deliberately taking her sweet time on her transaction.
As I’ve said before I feel sorry for the staff at this branch more than anything. It’s not their fault they’re understaffed and it’s like the place is a magnet for the craziest people in Shepherd’s Bush and given how crazy the average Shepherd’s Bush resident is that’s some pretty crazy craziest people. The frazzled man behind the glass, seeing the time and the length of the queue was clearly a bit perturbed that the woman had not used the twenty-five minutes waiting time to have all her stuff out of her bag and ready to go. He mildly criticised her for this, which made her more indignant and angry and slowed her down even further. He had been polite as was possible and was merely offering advice (and I suspect from his tone had had to deal with this woman before). Of course having had to wait for so long did not make her sympathetic to the people behind her. Now she was here she was going to make the most of her time and slow things down as much as possible to show how annoyed she was with the world. To be honest, it’s pricks like this who are going to lead us spiralling to our doom. We could try to work together to get through the shit that life throws at us, but some people will only see how a situation affects them and have no empathy or concern for others. The psychopaths will take us all down with them.
Having taken five minutes to complete whatever it was she was doing, the woman started very slowly repacking her bag right in front of the window. She could have repacked during the five minutes or she could have just moved across to the next empty window and done her repacking there, but she was determined either knowingly or unknowingly (or a tantalising combination of the two) to make an unpleasant situation worse. The man behind the window caught my eye, both apologetic and frustrated. He asked the woman to move aside, which again just prompted another barrage of anger from her, made her pack more slowly and she stood her ground. I was going to say something myself, but I worked out, correctly, that that would just make this torture last even longer. The woman had a big pram with two kids in it and I suspect she was tired and frazzled herself and maybe just wanted to make this interaction with some adults last a bit longer to postpone her return to her other hardships. But also she was clearly a bit mad anyway.
I finally got to the counter and the man, falsely identifying me as another sane person in this modern day Bedlam where he has to make his living, bemoaned having to deal with situations like that. It was now 5.30 and the front doors were locked, but a man was making a fuss and trying to get in. “He does that every day,” the man told me, “He turns up at 5.30, just as the doors are closing and makes a big fuss and tries to get in. Every day, the same thing.” A man on the door was remonstrating and telling the complainant that he couldn’t come in, as he must already know in his Groundhog Day existence. The man behind the counter looked so sad and beaten by all this madness. All I could do was to get by item weighed as quickly as possible, pay up and leave (being let through the front door as the hopeful idiot outside waited to get in, even though he never got let in and in any case why was he trying to get in there? Was that the only fun he had in his life, trying to get into the worst place in Shepherd’s Bush at a time when he wasn’t allowed in there, presumably only to be thrown out pretty much straight away). There were still a good 30 people in the queue behind me and still only two staff to deal with them. And how many of those 30 would be mad and how many sane? There was at least half an hour more work for the beleaguered staff, some still trying to fix what postage machines, some acting as bouncers to the worst nightclub in the world, some trying to sell stamps.
I had only lost 30 minutes of my day. I got to escape. I wanted to take the man behind the counter with me and free him from this life sentence. But he wouldn't have come.
