Dear Satan:

I think I may believe in you now. You see, I know what hell is now, and it is the United States Post Office branch at Broad and Sansom.

I spent an hour and a half there on Tuesday. An hour and a half. The line wasn't obscenely long – but there was only one clerk at the window. And even that wouldn't have been much of a problem, except that apparently, everyone standing in line was doing some sort of complicated, time-consuming mailing. In the first twenty minutes that I was standing in line, exactly one person completed a transaction.

Now, I'm not sure if you're aware of this, but I have trouble standing for extended periods of time. I've got a yoga instructor and a pilates instructor both helping me work on it, and I was recently given a gift certificate so that I can have a professional masseur take a crack. I can be on my feet for extended periods of time if I'm moving around, but standing on tile floor for ninety minutes... actually, come to think of it, that was probably just a part of your plan, wasn't it?

The natives were growing restless. A particularly angry man stormed past me and out the door with such force that I was worried he'd knock over the two women walking in with boxes stacked up to their chins. A young girl with a particularly heavy South Philly accent was on her cell phone, trying really hard to stave off a nervous breakdown. (Her package had to get postmarked that day, she kept insisting to the person on the other end of the call.) The guy in line in front of me joked about how he knew he should have sent his interns in his stead. I searched around me to find something on which I could crack my back. All this time, the line barely moved, even when a second postal service employee started calling people up to his window.

At around this point, we discovered one reason why the line might have been so long: The nearest [superterranean, at least – there's the subterranean Post Office in Suburban Station] Post Office, on 13th Street, had shut its doors for the day because someone thought it would be funny to pull the fire alarm. The staff there, instead of heading to the Broad Street Station to help out with the pending crowd overflow, decided to call it a day and went home. Neither of these stations is a large one, but they see a good amount of traffic – combining the two results in quite a SNAFU.

At long, long last, I made it to the front of the line. I had two envelopes to send regular first class mail, one to send priority mail, and two rather heavy boxes. Five items that shouldn't have taken more than a few minutes to mail – except that the gentleman to whose window I had arrived was blessed with a broken stamp printer (your fault, I'm sure!), and so instead of printing exact postage and slapping it on the parcels I was mailing, he had to calculate the exact postage using stamps. $10.96 in postage stamps on one package meant:

• Two $4.60 priority mail stamps.
• One $1.00 stamp.
• One $0.58 stamp. (They were out of the $0.75 stamps – clearly, that would have made things too easy)
• One $0.10 stamp.
• Four $0.02 stamps.

Don't even get me started about the other four items I was sending.

People were glaring at me. I could feel their eyes burning into the back of my head. Twice, I turned around and apologized to the twenty or so people in line behind me. It was 4:40PM. They weren't sure that they'd get through the line by 5PM – and if they didn't, they were quite sure that the post office would close anyway.

At long last, the mailing was completed, and I could return to work. Where I had to stay late because of your trickery.

Not cool, Satan. You'd think you're the kind of guy who actually wants people to make it to happy hour...

Image via Flickr user tanais.