Friday, June 4, 2010

So I had to go to a bigger Post Office today...Normally, I go to a post office in a small town, where they are polite and courteous and efficient.

Not so in this larger post office. There were three people at the windows. A line 15 people long, which grew quite a bit while I was in it. All due to the lack of efficiency of the 3 postal workers.

I'll list them as the dwarf, the gimp and the corpse.

I had a great deal of time to observe these three as I spent 20 minutes in line.

The gimp was just that, a polite man who was frail, appeared to be of indeterminate gender (although the slight beard indicated a likely male). He was soft spoken and, as I said, polite. He did not have a sense of urgency. If I had to guess, I would say that he was recently recovered from a serious car accident. Sadly, he was the most efficient of the three, moving at nearly half speed as compared to a person employed in a non government job.

 The dwarf was just that, a dwarf. With terribly arthritic fingers. So terribly arthritic that she was unable to input information correctly despite trying multiple times. God only knows how many pieces of mail are now labeled incorrectly and will spend the next week wandering about the country in a vain search for their destinations. I am fairly certain that she was standing on a box behind the counter. Apparently, the concept of dong more than one thing at a time was beyond her comprehension. Generally, it took 2 trips to get anything done.

Lastly, we had the corpse. Wavering somewhere between unconscious and dead, she was barely able to find the stamps or to take packages. Her speed was something slightly faster than a corpse, but not quite to the level of a coma patient. It was apparent that she was aware that her retirement date was (at that time) 9 years, 4 months, 2 weeks, 4 days, 1 hour and 16 minutes away, and she was unwilling to work any harder than she had to before that time came.

These folks were like caricatures of government workers come to life. 

God help us if the Obamacare system hires folks like this. People will die waiting in line. Babies may well be conceived, gestated and delivered while their parents are waiting for health care decisions.

Why do government service jobs collect such inefficient misfits? 

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