The Trophies Wear Prada

There’s a line in the movie “Beetlejuice” in which Alec Baldwin’s and Geena Davis’s case worker tells them that people who commit suicide are doomed to be civil servants in the afterlife.  Perhaps, but I think it is more likely they are forced to wait in line at the post office.

Armed with a day off from work and many to-do’s on my plate after a weekend of goofing off (knitting), I set off to do the dreaded, run errands.  I hate running errands; I hate leaving our little valley of love for the mean streets of

Scottsdale

, rife with trophy wives and incoming snowbirds.  The Kachina Post Office is probably the greatest single example of the stereotypical population of North Scottsdale this time of year (apparently south

Scottsdale

is so not the place-to-be.)  Standing in line today for a full 45 minutes, I was surrounded by rail-thin, high-bottomed, silicon-breasted, Burberry purse-carrying, Chanel sunglass-wearing, bleached blondes in their thirties.  Of course, they could be eighty for all I know.  The doctors around here are damned good.  Sharing the line were the elder crowd, known here as the aforementioned snowbirds, fleeing the soon-to-be frigid plains of the Midwest and activating their mail service together all on the same day, today, the day I went to the post office.  Most of these people are actually very nice but I think they are a little lonely.  I say this because when one reaches the counter, he or she engages in a long conversation with the clerk about anything and everything, aches and pains, wonderful grandchildren, good-for-nothing kids that don’t come to visit with wonderful grandchildren, the weather here, the weather back home, and anything else he or she can think up.  In a daze, I watch aggravated businessmen, hoping to jet in and mail an oversized envelope, gloomily look around and head back out the door.  I exchange glances with a few of the semi-normals around the place who, like me, can’t believe the elderly have so much to say.  We try as one not to look at the tiny have-to-be surgically lifted rear ends of the Barbies wearing Prada or the mammary melons bulging from their too-tight, too-low tops.  We have formed an unspoken bond of incredulity.

We then turn our attentions to the clerks, the civil service postal workers who know, barring incredibly violent behavior or sexual harassment, they will never get fired and, therefore, move at the slowest pace possible to mankind.  It does not matter that the line runs out the door and that the trophies are already bonding and planning shopping trips to Neiman’s, play dates for their Baby Gap-clad children, and Bunco games for them and their Range Rover-driving husbands.  It doesn’t matter that more than a few blue hairs are looking scarily aged and should not be standing in line with locked knees and artificial hips for any length of time.  The postal workers crawl.  They pick up a package and take five minutes to walk with it behind the counter to the canvas parcel-holding bag.  They stop and talk to each other.  And even though there is room for five “workers,” only three are “working” and, of those three, no more than two are in place at one time.  It must be a rule in the USPS handbook.  A few of us, myself included, look like we are on the verge of losing it, which must be the true “going postal,” but finally, 45 minutes after entering purgatory, I am released and gleefully flee the Hell that is the Kachina Post Office.

Thankfully, I get to work tomorrow.

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[Matt From Scottsdale Storage]

Tell me about it, this is now the Beverly Hills of the Desert.
Matt From Scottsdale Storage