Heather Christena Schmidt

I think we all knew this was going to happen at some point, right? I did. I just never knew it would actually have to do with the post office. I really don’t spend that much time there – especially after that incident last year when the random lady braced the table for sorting your mail and putting on stamps and stuff, then proceeded to lean over and rip one so loud the entire place grew quiet. Kind of ironic, I suppose.

You always think that it’s the postal workers that are going to go postal; that created that euphemism to begin with. Disgruntled with a low paying, back-breaking job, the lonely postal worker finally gets fed up with his meager lifestyle and goes nuts on the next old lady that comes in bitching because his branch no longer carries stamps depicting Elvis Presley she was just salivating to lick.

But the only postal workers I have ever come into contact with are usually way too arrogant to ever have a meltdown. I imagine “must have a pompous and superior sense of self” is a qualification to work at my local United States Post Office branch. No, none of those people will ever go postal.

And yet they caused me to.

Let me back-track a little. So I made up my own recipe for a low fat pumpkin bread. I think it’s pretty amazing, really. But I think everything I cook is amazing and everyone in my family usually takes a ginormous dump on it. To combat their rudeness and find out if the recipe was really worth it, I asked if any of my friends wanted some. Much to my surprise, a lot of them did, although quite a few needed to be mailed out.

No big deal, right? During the holidays people send food and shit like that all over the fucking place.

I usually use the prepaid postage envelopes and boxes, which make things really cheap to ship, so I baked fifteen miniature loaves of pumpkin bread, fucking slaving and shit in the kitchen and afterwards to get it packaged up. Then I went to the post office to get the envelopes and those motherfuckers told me that they raised the postage rates of them to nearly $6 a piece.

Whatever. I already baked the shit. Duly noted for the future. The post office is ripping people off left and right anyway, I shouldn’t be surprised. If you or any of your family or friends work for the post office, I’m wholeheartedly sorry, but my local postal branch is full of a bunch of lazy motherfuckers that are always standing around and trying actively not to work. And they screw up constantly; once they even delivered an envelope in a plastic baggie marked “damaged.” All that remained of the envelope was a corner – I don’t even know what the fuck it was.

Okay, back to the point.

So I took those little $6 fuckers into the post office and walked up to the counter to get the postage for it. The lady told me she couldn’t sell me the postage for them. I said “what are you talking about, I just bought prepaid postage from you yesterday.” She said “oh, prepaid postage … I thought you said stamps.”

Since when in the fuck can you not buy stamps at the post office from the counter?

So I bought the shit from her and she asked me nine questions about insurance and perishables. What are the contents? Pumpkin bread. Do you want to insure them? No. What are the contents? I just fucking told you: pumpkin bread. When she asked if that was technically a perishable, I told her “it’s not like I’m sending packages of rotting meat.” I suppose I was a little testy at that point.

So she took my money, wearing a black ski mask and holding a gun to my head. I then begrudgingly moved on to the kiosk to buy stamps, since she insisted she could not sell me stamps only for her to start screaming at me from across the post office that I needed to come back.

The post office would not send my pumpkin bread. They considered it to be a hazardous perishable that could endanger lives and be viewed as a terrorist threat to the entire country.

Are you fucking kidding me? They are clearly making up their own rules just to work as hard as possible to avoid working.

At this point, the bread is bad. But I have a newfound vendetta against the post office and really want to know how others think of it. Maybe I’ll reclaim my life by selling it in farmer’s markets or something – who knows? So I plan on rebaking the bread, concealing it in fall-themed plastic bags, and sending it with the proper amount of postage made up of 45 cent stamps purchased at the goddamned kiosk since the postal workers won’t sell me stamps anymore.

I feel as though I’ve gone postal. I keep walking around the house, getting everything together for this massive, offensive move I am making in my war against the post office. If you come close enough to the window, you might even hear me muttering over and over again, “I’ll show them…I’ll show them real good…”