At the Post Office, again...

or... why can old people still be racist and get away with it ?

I'm starting to enjoy going to the Post Office.
Its a brilliant place to people watch.

Yesterday I returned to the house still clutching the blue-penned mail redirection form after the abortive attempt to get the old bag of a Post Mistress to accept the wrong coloured ink and as I entered the house explaining of my trials and tribulations together with the vow never to return to the bloody Post Office again I was hit hard in the head by a heavy thing thrown by Suzanne.

I awoke this morning refreshed and with the convction that I had to return to the Post Office with a new mail redirection form - I thought that I had thrown out that Paul McKenna "Hypnotise your partner for fun and profit" book, but maybe not.

So I filled out the form again, got everyone to sign it again, ticked all the boxes again and set off again for the Post Office.

But this time I went to a different Post Office, one that is located in not such a leafy suburb, one that caters almost exclusively for its clientele of benefits drawers and pension claimants, its a bit down at heel and the money handed over its counter in one direction far outweighs the money handed over the counter in the other direction, I'll leave you to guess which direction is the most popular.

Its a small shop with two glassed-in counters at which two gentlemen of the Post Office were serving, one of whom was Indian and owned this Post Office and at least one other in the district, as I was to discover.

That is, I think the other Post Office employee was serving the man stood at his counter as neither of them seemed to be doing anything that could be construed as a transaction of any kind, the man behind the counter was gazing down at something on his desk and the elderly customer was gazing at his own feet whilst leaning heavily on his walking stick, silence ensued.

Or at least silence would have ensued if the Indian owner and his customer hadn't seemed to have known each other, nor seen each other, for many years. Three other people were in the queue in front of me and as I entered the shop they all turned to me with a desperate look of acceptance of their fate - we were in for a long wait, the Indian owner and his customer were catching up on old times.

"You remember John don't you..."
"No I don't think I do madam,"
"You do, John, you know, John, John, married to Elaine"
"I remember Elaine, was she pregnant last year"
"Yes, Elaine, well thats Johns wife"
"Ah yes, I think I know John"
"You must know John, Elaines husband, she was pregnant last year, had a little boy"
"Did they, how nice, I know Elaine"
"Well you'll know John then, her husband, they had a baby last year"
"Yes I think I know John"

I'd only been in the shop for two minutes and already I was bearing the same look of resignation that the other queue-ers were,

"Well John, Elaines John, he was in Tesco's the other day"
"John with the new baby ?"
"Yes, Elaines John, well he was in Tesco's"
"Yes ?"
"Well thats it, he was in Tesco's, I was just saying, he was in Tesco's see."
"Oh very nice, I don't use Tesco's"
"No neither do I normally, but I was in there the other day, and there was John, Elaines John, in Tesco's"
"Yes"

The small old man stood in the queue in front of me sighed heavily, reached out and leaned on a greetings card stand which started to revolve ever so slowly and I found myself wondering if the degredation of mental prowess in the aged would mean that he wouldn't notice that it was moving until he had reached the point at which the weight of his upper body moving across the fulcrum of his waist would be pulled inexorably to earth by gravity in an unstopable tumble and fracture of one or both hip bones, or perhaps if his hip bones were already plastic he may gash his head badly and I'd be able to tear off his stupid tweed tie and use it to supurate the blood flow.

None of this happened but its an indicator of just how slowly time passes in a Post Office queue that such things actually spend time in your concious thoughts at all.

The door opened and yet another small old man entered the already crowded shop - why are all old people so much smaller than subsequent generations ? - this old man looked up with a face as miserable as I've ever seen outside of a car smash thats just happened right outside a car showroom after a new car has just been collected, he shoved a sign advertising pre-payment electricity tokens out of his way and took up his place in the queue behind me muttering something that I couldn't quite pick up on.

"Do you still have the Post Office at Bramhope ?"
"No we closed that one"
"Oh dear, thats a shame"
"Not really because no-one used it you see"
"Oh well thats all right then, Elaine told me you'd closed it, she said it was a shame"
"Yes well we were very quiet there, not like this place"
"Ooh yes its always busy here isn't it"
"Yes"

And in my mind I see my arm reaching out and tapping her on her stupid shoulder so that her stupid head turns and I get to look straight into her stupid face and tell her that its wouldn't be quite so fuckin busy in here if she'd just shut the fuck up, buy her fuckin stamps and fuck off back home again, but I don't, even though the old sod behind me would probably join in as well, the old git in front probably would too from his prone position, broken hipped on the floor, but we don't, none of us do, we just stand there and stare at the ceiling or floor because us British are too reserved to upset fuckwits who just want to talk aimless, mind-numbingly aimless, absolute fucking pointless conversation all day long - we stand there and we sigh and sometimes glance at another queue sufferer and raise our eyebrows in mutual helplessness, but we never say anything.

Ten minutes later and I'm at the counter and I smile and hand my mail redirection form to the man behind the glass and he looks at it as though its not a real Post Office form at all but a declaration of war on France or similar and I have to explain that its a mail redirection form, filled in with black ink, and he looks very carefully at it and nods once as if he agrees so I ask him how much it will cost to redirect the mail for three months even though I know its £15.10 and he looks very carefully at the part of the form where I've ticked the option that states "3 months - £15.10" and he tells me that it will be £15.10 so I fill out the cheque.

Its gone quiet again in the Post Office and then the old sod who was stood behind me joins me at the counter where he is served by the Indian owner and while my counter man sits down and starts to read the mail redirection leaflet right the way through to make sure that he doesn't miss ticking a box or over-charging me for something else, I tune into the old sod's conversation next door...

"Recorded delivery" is all he says and flings a letter underneath the glass
"Yes sir" says the owner, "first class ?"
"What ?"
"First class ?"
"What ?"
"Do you want it to be sent first class ?"
"Of course I do"
"First class recorded delivery ?"
"Thats what I said" and he sighs as well.
"OK"

"Shall I write your address on the back sir "
"What ?"
"Shall I write your address on the back sir"
"On the back of what ?"
"On the back of the envelope sir"
"Why ?"
"Well you can you see, it tells them who's sent it before they sign for it"
"What ?"
"It tells them who's sent it"
"They'll know who's sent it"
"OK, do you want me to do it then ?"
"Do what ?"
"Write your address on the back sir"
"Do I have to ?"
"I'll do it for you sir"
"Please yer bloody self then"
"I'll do it then"
"What ?"
"I'll do it then"
"If you want"

Its fascinating listening and I lean on the counter and turn to my left to get a better view and the old sod sees me, glares in my direction and mutters to me, "I can't understand a word he's bloody saying" and I know its because the Post Office owner is Indian and this old sod switches off when he hears an Indian accent no matter how mild it may be, this Indian owner must get this all day long in here, his own shop, he's providing a service to this miserable old sod and all he gets is rudeness and racism but because its old mans rudeness and racism everyone accepts it.

Its hilarious none the less, and I can't help an involuntary guffaw as I leave the shop and I hear the old sod tell the Indian owner "say it again, I can't understand what you're saying" in a particularly condescending way and I wonder how the rest of the world has moved on from the 1950's and left this old sod behind with his predjudices and how many more of them are like him living on this council estate and how many of them are miserable simply because they have to speak to an Indian Post Office owner several times a week.

At the Post Office...

The traditional British Post Office has been taking some stick in recent years, its a staple of British town and village life that is fast disappearing in a tsunami of cost cuting and downsizing as HM Government tries its hardest to bring its spending down to nothing on the postal service.

In theory its a private service, the Post Office has its own budgets and expenditure, but it has grants and its tightly controlled by civil servants so that the Postmaster General has to crawl up Downing Street on his knees over white hot broken shards of glass with cap in hand before asking Tony B if he can put the cost of a first class stamp up by one penny, and even then he'll get told "no".

The Post Offices that we all know in our locales are certainly privately owned, but maintained by central Post Office funding for doing jobs like stamping parcels very hard with those hard rubber stamping things, right where it says "Fragile, do not stamp here", then asking if you want to buy insurance for that.

And we all have this vision of what a Post Office is like and how vital a Post Office is to our local communities, how all the old people gather at the Post Office every day for tea and a chat and how we'd miss them terribly if they all disapeared and we'd have to take the parcelled up stuff we'd just flogged on eBay to a couriers depot for delivery instead, no that would never do we all cry and we bemoan the demise of the local Post Offices and beseach Government to grant them some more grants so that they may survive just a tad longer.


So today I went to my local Post Office.
Its been there as long as I can remember and my local knowledge of this area goes back nearly 50 years now (I don't remember the bits before I started to talk).

For the first ten years that I remember it was owned by someone ferocious looking with a huge grey handlebar moustache called "Squire" - and that was just his wife.

Recently I haven't a clue who owns it because until today I had been in our local Post Office almost exactly nil times.

Today I went in there to hand in a form that requests the Post Office to redirect our mail from our old address to our new address - a simple enough task, fill the form in correctly where it says "name" and again where it says "old address" and then finally and most importantly the bit where it says "new address". I managed all of this without too much assistance from the four pages of notes that they kindly supplied with the single sided form and taking two forms of identity with me (presumably I might forge one document but would never stoop to forge two), and £15 with which to bribe the Post Office people into performing this onerous redirecting task, I entered our local Post Office.

Random old people stood around, writing things on forms at various shelves around the perifery of the public area, one holding a Bic pen to the light to see if there was any ink left in it or whether it was his cataracts that were playing up again, one old lady was re-arranging the contents of her old-lady-tartan-bag-on-wheels, two old ladies stood muttering to each other whilst using extravagant hand gestures to illuminate their gossip, and one of the two counters was occupied by yet another geriatric who was leaning almost right through the glass plate in order to hear what the miserable cow serving on the other side was saying to her.

With no-one seemingly interested in taking up the empty counter position I volunteered myself, to be greeted by a lady of breeding in a high frilly collared shirt buttoned with a brooch in the style made famous by Laura Ashley who made her millions thirty years ago by selling to such ladies whilst not bothering to spend any of her fortune on a good, reliable stair carpet fitter.

The sour-faced old hag in the Laura Ashley blouse and brooch stared her sour-puss face through the inch-thick bullet proof glass, stared into my very soul and demanded, "Yes ?"

"I have earlier filled out this here form" I presented the form in front of the glass but did not yet push it through the slot for her attention, "this form which was collected by my wife from this very counter just three days ago" I further explained, "and I think I've filled everything in, and I have brought two forms of identity as requested, and I would be most grateful if perchance you would look it over and accept fifteen pounds in payment for your excellent and reknown redirecting service", I explained.

She said nothing but one hand pointed to the slot in the bullet proof glass, indicating that I push the form through there, which started me thinking - why bother with bullet proof glass if you then cut a slot through it at what is stomach height to the counter staff, surely the robbers with the guns and bullets will just shove their pistols through the slot too ?

Anyhoo, the old bag took my form with a look of distain as if she would catch some filthy disease from it, which indeed she may as I have had a terrible man-flu these past few days of removals and for all I know the old bag could well be a man, she has the whiskers for it.

"I think I filled it in correctly", I offered.

"Yes you did" she replied, "but its the wrong colour" she added with just a hint of delight in her voice that did not go un-noticed by the other hags on my side of the counter who shuffled forwards to gaze and nod and confirm that yes, it was the wrong colour.

"The wrong colour" I queried for I knew nought of what she informed.

"The wrong colour" she responded, pointing at something at the top of the form.

She leaned backwards into a drawer behind her and without taking her miserable face away from mine plucked another redirection form from its depths and thrust it back through the glass at me.

"Its got to be filled in black ink" and she sighed as she finally gave away the answer to me.

"Black ink ?" I still wasn't taking this in.

"You used blue ink" her patience was fading fast by now, "you used blue ink" and she stabbed at my completed form with a long pointy finger as if I were the worlds most stupid Post Office customer and with the same amount of exasperation as if I came into her post Office every single day with the same form filled in with blue ink instead of black.

And that was it, no post redirection for me then.
I use the wrong ink for my forms.
I'll be buggered if I'm buying a black Bic just to please the old bag.
I'll walk around the corner to the old house and collect my mail until people stop sending it there.

But at least I now have no need to hold any sympathy for Post Office staff when they close them all down.