There are huge differences between the American Post Office and the Italian one. In our little post office in California, the folks manning the windows are kind, pleasant, and efficient. All decisions are binary: yes or no. What’s it cost? There’s a number behind a dollar sign for that. The number isn’t negotiable. It doesn’t change day to day—maybe once a year at most. Customers stand in lines crisp and neat.
In Italy you have to gird your loins for battle before ambling over to the Post Office. Well, maybe you have to gird your buttocks if you’re a sitter—it’s gonna be a long wait. It doesn’t matter what time it is or how many people are standing around—it’s gonna be a while and you’re gonna sit if there are chairs and complain if there are not.
Customers mill around throughout the closet our Italian Post Office is built into like molecules of gas, dispersing throughout the limited ether inside the Post Office as if by nature looking for equilibrium amongst the gathered mass. They have carefully noted, of course, their position in line—or they have asked and been informed when their turn would be. All is well, turn wise.
If it comes before judgment day that is.
In any case, lots of people, expats usually, spit venom over the PO in Italy. That’s understandable. We come from a place that doesn’t burn train cars full of Christmas cards rather than going to the trouble of actually delivering them at the busiest time of the year. That’s probably because we don’t use trains so much to deliver our mail in the US. We don’t use them much at all.
Once you get to the front of the line, it will appear that prices for mailing a package, it seems, can be negotiated. Or they change daily. Arbitrarily. You really can’t figure it out, even if you’re a journalist.
In any case, I need to come to my point, which is the picture you see just above this paragraph. It’s a “package” that arrived today at my California palace and Wandering Italy Foreign Nerve Center (WIFNC). Inside was Fred Plotkin’s highly anticipated tome Italy for the Gourmet Traveler brought up to date. We were salivating, but now, as you see, the contents of our package, sent US Priority Mail, seem to have been ripped off. They were nice enough to actually deliver the torn, official padded envelope.
So there’s something else you can add to your list of how Post Offices in the US are highly superior to those in Italy: the folks (or at least one “folk”) who “deliver” the mail in the US have great taste and aren’t afraid to show it.
We all have our priorities, eh? I’m officially PO’ed.