Going Postal

So I'm sitting here working, listening to the Rockies spring-training game, and this ad comes on. I'd heard it many -- too many -- times on times on Rockies games, where ads replay ad nausem over and over all season like some KGB -- or CIA -- torture.

This one was about the U.S. Postal Service's automated postal services -- which, the Postal Service claims, can do 85 percent of the transactions that you can do with a living, breathing -- and wage-earning -- post office clerk. And even though I had blocked the ad like psychic-spam from my mind, a phrase punctured through and stuck me:

Sometimes, a dumb-blondy voice squeaks secretively, I say 'thank you' to it. That's weird, right?

No. Unfortunately.

But good ol' Durango is, though. Perhaps because those of us dwelling here in southwest Colorado are here by choice, and one of the things that made us make that choice is that we like the big, broad tribe we all belong to.

I think that's why the other day I was in our own busy little down-town post office, waiting in line with several others and next to a woman with a baby that I'd struck up a non-verbal conversation with, when the upper half of a uniformed woman spoke through the firedoors from the lobby.

"There's several of our new automated postage machines out here, if anyone would like to try one."

She smiled. We in line smiled back. She smiled again. We smiled again.

She stopped smiling. She slipped back out the door. And we went back to our waiting, together, to interact with a real, live human being.

Now that's weird, eh?

******

This post also appears on InsideOutsideMag.com. Check it out!