Digital Diatribe

It smells like pee in here again. If only the air vents didn’t mysteriously vent from the toilets on random days.

HUUUUUURRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR

I love ordering shit off the internet.
It takes so long for stuff to get to this god forsaken island that by the time it arrives I’ve more than likely forgotten what it was, which causes me to take a unprecedented interest in every parcel that I have to go to the Post Office to pick up just in case I ordered something really cool that I’d forgotten about.

However the process of going to the post office in order to pick up something that you paid to have delivered to you really kind of defeats the whole fucking purpose of paying someone to fucking well deliver it to you.

What is the point of delivering something to my house during work hours, and expecting me to sign for it, if I’m bloody well at work?
And if you’re not going to deliver it to my place of work because I work in a tower in the sky and you can’t be fucked waiting for the lift, then where the fuck am I supposed to get it delivered to? It’s not as if anyone delivers to PO Boxes any more thanks to internet fraud.

Which brings me back to having to go to the post office to pick it up.
Only the post office is only open between 9am and 5pm. Which coincidently is the exact same time period for which I’m supposed to be at work. Funny that.
So now I have to take time off work in order to pick up something that was supposed to be delivered to me anyway. Not that I particularly enjoy where I work, but there is a certain expectation that I still show up if I expect to continue to get paid.

I wouldn’t mind so much if I only had to take time off and sign for the thing as it was being delivered to my house, but as nobody is prepared to make guarantees in these non committal times (just look at the divorce rate!) that would probably mean waiting by my front door for several weeks in a row by which point I would have frozen to death, died of heat stroke and been eaten alive by the local wildlife, but not necessarily in that order.

So off to the post office I go, simply wanting to pick up my parcel, and I’m confronted with a queue of people all wanting to do things other than post stuff, or pick stuff up.

Why is it that the post office doesn’t just send and recieve post? Or simply handle shit to do with the mail? Why does it feel the need to offer a myriad of other services, such as inkjet printers, mobile phones and Wiggles DVD’s.

Not only can I send a letter but I can do my banking too! Like I could at an actual bank!
Or I can buy a mobile phone from someone who barely even knows how to use one! I could do that at any mobile phone store.
So now I’m forced to wait in line while some idiot tries to work out what the difference between two seemingly identical children’s popup books are because one of them happens to have a slightly different looking worm with different googly eyes than the other one. What in the fuck does that have to do with the mail? A Post Office isn’t a pre teen book shop, fuck off so that I can finally pick up my parcel and figure out what the hell it was that I wasted my money and now a considerable portion of my morning on.

I make my way closer to the front of the queue only to find that now somebody wants to pay several utility bills in cash. Several thousand dollars worth of cash. And he’s still in his work clothes. You’re not avoiding tax at all, are you?
So not only can you now do you banking you can also avoid having money show up in your bank account from all your cash in hand work by using that cash to pay off your bills pretty much as soon as you get paid it. Thanks Post Office, I’m sure the tax department is loving you. I know I am.

I’m now at the front of the queue and I’ve completely forgotten what the hell I came in for after having been distracted by the endless piles of laser printers and usb foot massagers stacked all over the place. Where am I? I reach into my pocket and find my delivery notification. Oh, that’s right, I came to pick up a parcel.

After handing over the card and a minute or two of having the counter assistant poke around out the back, now I get a barrage of questions such as how big the parcel was, what colour was the packing material and where it came from.
I’ve never seen the fucking thing before, and I’ve got no idea which of the seven parcels that I ordered from five different countries this particular delivery notification might relate to. I kind of thought it was your job to know this stuff. GAAAAHHHHHH!

To cut a long story short, they finally find the parcel and I open it once I finally get into work, only to find it’s a not some incredibly cool futuristic sex robot but in fact a box of Flying Screaming Monkeys.

At least the next few hours of work are enjoyable, if not entirely predictable. (Well apart from the Monkey water torture…)