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When posting my old copy of Mac OS X.3 which I sold through amazon’s site (huge fees but very hassle free), I had another run-in with the postal service. I first went to the post office but the queue there was so damn long that I chose to use the stamp selling machine again… Just to discover it was out of order – and apparently is called WZ-Automat
by the post office inhabitants, where it’s left up to the visitor to figure out that WZ
is short for Wertzeichen
and probably ultra-short for Postwertzeichen
, i.e. post value marks, which is how bureaucrats like to think of stamps.
But I remembered that there’s another one of these machines on the other side of the road – which is kind of absurd as it’s just standing there and they removed the postbox next to it a while ago. So I got my stamps there and then walked back to the post office to put the package into the post box. Which was the next thing I failed at, because it was too thick to go in. There is a maximum height for letters but I was still within that range. So there went my last respect for the postal service – which in a good bureaucratic way I had assumed to build their post boxes so the openings have a height which actually relates to the maximum allowable height. But it doesn’t… and there I went into the long queue.
It didn’t move too slowly but it still took a while. So I was positively surprised when a guy walked through the line distributing little packs of candy and apologising for the long wait. It didn’t save me time but surely made me feel better.