Weekly Karma #7

There I was at the post office, standing in line with a box full of nearly 20 envelopes that all needed to be weighed, stamped and paid for one at a time.

There were four people in front of me. One of them had about 60 envelopes that all needed to be weighed, stamped, and paid for one at a time.

There was only one attendant working the register and her mailing tape kept getting stuck. As a result, it took her a good 15 minutes to weigh and stamp all of this woman’s mail.

I’m embarrassed to say that I actually thought, “I can’t believe this woman has so much freaking mail.”

Then I looked at my box full of envelopes. That’s when I thought, “Man, people are really going to love it when I get up to the counter.”

Right about then, three more people came into the post office and got in line behind me. One at a time they noticed my huge box on the ground and released a huge sigh. One of them was a large man who looked at my box of envelopes and said loudly, “I bet no one likes being behind you when you come to the post office.”

I just smiled politely and said, “I guess not.” I only said, “I guess not” because I was trying to be kind. Inside, however, I was pretty dang miffed.

I found myself silently telling the guy off, saying things like this, “Look Dude, I almost never have a lot of mail with me. I’m one of those people who just buys stamps, picks up her certified mail, or checks her post office box. It’s not my fault that the one day out of 10 years I have a lot of stuff to mail also happens to be the day that there is only one attendant and her tape machine isn’t working right. Maybe it’s my bad Karma that put ME here in this interminable line, but it was your own bad Karma that put YOU here so why don’t you just chew on that for a while you big bag of hot air.”

Yeah, it’s not always pretty inside my head.

Anyway, I didn’t say any of this out loud, of course, so the big loud mouth went on.

“Yeah, figures, the Internet Queen had to come to the post office this morning.”

The Internet Queen?!? At first I thought he actually knew I had a blog and a Facebook page and whatnot. This was not the case, as I soon learned.

“You EBay people are always clogging up the line at the Post Office. You’ve got all this stuff to mail. There’s always one of you here to slow down the line.”

Now I was really ticked.

“EBay? He thinks this is crap from my house that I sold to people through EBay?!”

There were a few curse words and insults mentally thrown in his direction for good measure. But we don’t need to get into those right now. It would just muddy up my story, I think.

So the poor woman with the 60 envelopes was still at the counter at this point. I’m pretty sure she wasn’t selling anything on EBay either, but what do I know? She was an older lady and I could tell from her body language that she was quite nervous and scared. She probably thought Mr. Loudmouth was talking to her rather than to me. She was practically sinking into herself. I felt for her.

Finally all her stuff got stamped and mailed. She turned around and courageously said to all of us in line, “I’m so sorry that I had so much mail.”

I said, “Don’t worry about it. Look at my box.” Someone else said, “We all have a lot of mail sometimes.”

Truer words were never spoken.

As the line moved forward, I pushed my box with my foot, sliding it forward along the floor. All the while, the loudmouth behind me kept saying stuff about EBay and the Internet. I just smiled and ignored him, as I was formulating a strategy and I was having a hard time talking myself into it.

Finally it was my turn to walk up to the counter.

I turned to the person behind me.

“Why don’t you go ahead of me,” I said.

She practically ran to the counter.

I did the same with the person behind her.

Now Mr. Loudmouth was directly behind me.

Let me tell you: I REALLY wanted to just walk up to the counter and take my sweet old time and make loudmouth wait FOREVER to complete his post office business. I SO wanted to do that.

But I didn’t.

“Go ahead,” I said with a very forced smile.

His entire demeanor changed. Seriously. It was amazing to watch. One second he was a man who clearly hated my guts and thought that I deserved to rot in hell with serial killers, child molesters and evil people who sell things on EBay.

The next he was treating me like his cherished grandchild.

“Let me get that for you,” he said as he leaned down and picked up my box. He stood and put it gently on the postal counter.

“I figured that might be heavy,” he said. “I guess you can make a lot of money selling things through EBay. Is it a good business for you?”

“It’s not what you think,” I said, now with a genuine smile. “Everything in that box is a gift that I am sending to someone else. Nearly all of the people I’m sending the gifts to are strangers or people I don’t know all that well.” (The box, by the way, was full of the books that I am giving away to readers of this site. More about that at the end of the post).

I cannot begin to describe the look of complete confusion that came over his face. For the first time since he’d walked into the post office, Mr. Loudmouth was speechless.

Until that moment, his angry deluded mind had projected a false picture. For the past 10 minutes, he’d been telling himself that I was a money hungry, greedy, selfish who-knows-what-else kind of an evil person who sells things on EBay. He had practically convinced himself of this.

Had I let my anger get the best of me and made him wait while I had walked up to the counter, I would have reinforced his delusion and caused him to assume everything he thought about me was true.

By allowing him to go ahead, I showed him that he might not want to be so quick to jump to conclusions about people.

As Mr. Loudmouth left the post office, he waved good-bye and he wished me a good day. I also wished him a good day, and I meant it. For the most part.

What would you have done in this situation? Would you have let people go ahead of you? Or would you have just cursed the guy out and told him to shut up already? Or would you have done something different?

Note #1: Because I spent so much time at the post office, I didn’t have time to get coffee. Because I didn’t have time to get coffee, I am going through withdrawal, which is why there is no headline on this post. What should I have titled this post? What headline do you think I should have come up with?

Note #2: A generous donor who wishes to remain anonymous has purchased and donated several copies of P:HEA and asked me to give them to readers who would appreciate them. For this reason, I will be expanding the giveaway from earlier in the week. I will be notifying winners over the next several days.

Note #3: Helen is the June Reader of the Month. Helen: you will be getting a free copy of Project: Happily Ever After + a day pass to Disney. I will be in touch with details. Note to others: to be eligible to be reader of the month, you just have to leave as many comments as possible. Once a month I randomly choose a winner from the Top Readers widget in the right hand sidebar of the site. The people with the most comments are listed in that widget.