New York Sign Language

Postal Self-Service Is a New Yorker's Best Choice

By BOB YAMPOLSKY

不親切な郵便局

We will start this month with an amusing little sign — SELF SERVICE NO EXTRA CHARGE. Why is it amusing, you ask? Well, because the idea behind self-service is that the customer does the work that usually a store clerk would do, and in return, the customer pays a lower price. And this is usually the case at, say, a gas station. But this sign acts as if self-service were an extra value that a customer would expect to pay more for — but in this establishment you get a special deal, self-service at no extra charge!

Now, having said that, let me explain why this sign actually does make perfect sense: It hangs in a U.S. Post Office in New York City, above a vending machine that sells stamps.

Post offices, it pains me to report, are not known for the quality of their service, and the problem is particularly bad in cities like New York. The lines are so long and slow, and the clerks are so surly and unhelpful, that it actually does make sense to pay a premium for self-service — i.e., the opportunity to avoid the standard post office "service."

To be fair, I should note that service in the post office has actually improved in recent years.

But it seems to me that the postal service is putting its greatest effort into encouraging people to stop coming to the post office. The vending machines are a step in that direction, since, while you do go to the post office, you do not have to interact with a post office human. They have a Stamp-by-Mail Service and they are letting more and more private businesses function as post offices.

This past holiday season I had to send a package to Japan. I went to my local post office, saw the tremendous line and decided to try mailing it from the drug store on the corner, which is a large chain store that accepts packages on behalf of the postal service. I knew I would have to pay a little extra, but there was no one in line at the mail service counter, and I was willing to pay extra for the time saved and the aggravation avoided.

I told the young man behind the counter that I wanted to send it to Japan.

"What's the zip code?" he asked.

A zip code, of course, is the equivalent of Japan's "yubinbango." So I tried to explain this to him. "It's a foreign country. It doesn't have a zip--"

"Every address needs a zip code." He gave me an impatient look, which then softened. He seemed to understand something. "It needs a country code," he said to me, as if this were something that I should have known.

He spent several minutes flipping through a book, during which time I resisted the urge to say, "J-A-P-A-N." At last he found the code. He weighed the package and told me, "$65 (¥7,800)." This was too much, so I asked him how much it would be by sea mail. He told me there was only airmail.

I tried to explain surface mail. "You know, by truck, by boa--"

"You can't drive a truck to Japan." And he made a gesture with his hand that in New York means, "Why do I have to deal with such idiots?"

The customer behind me spoke to me gently: "Perhaps you should go to the post office."

"Yeah," said the fellow behind the counter. "Go to the post office."

So I went to the post office.

The line was horrendous, but I waited. In this post office, the clerks all sit behind a pane of bulletproof glass, and a deranged customer was yelling at a clerk through the glass. Finally, after about 15 minutes, my turn came.

Because of the bulletproof barrier, there was an elaborate process to get the clerk my package. I had to open a window, insert my package into a compartment and close the window, whereupon the clerk opened the window on his side and removed my package from the compartment. The compartment, which is also made of bulletproof glass, is designed so that the windows on either side cannot be opened simultaneously, thus preventing me from being able to assassinate the people on the other side.

I would like to take a minute here to teach you a new phrase: "to go postal." This phrase means to take a gun, preferably an automatic one, into your place of employment and shoot as many of your supervisors and fellow workers as possible. This is something that postal workers commonly do. (I'm exaggerating, of course — fewer than 100 postal workers have been shot in such incidents in the past 20 years.) And thus this has become a well-known phrase. At my old job we even used to discuss who among us was most likely to go postal.

This is the sort of thing I thought of as I dealt with the clerk behind the bulletproof glass. He looked extremely unhappy, and it occurred to me that the bulletproof glass might actually be protecting me, too. When I pointed out to him that he had failed to clear the previous transaction from his cash register, adding an extra $15 (¥1,800) to the price of my postage, he smiled and said, "I'm glad you caught that."

I was about to say, "Not as glad as I am," but something about his smile bothered me — it was almost, well, maniacal. So what I said was this: "Thank you."

Shukan ST: Jan. 29, 1999

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