Sure, our new post office is bright and shiny and only slightly tinier than the number of cells in Rush Limbaugh’s brain dedicated to understanding the concept of birth control.
Our post office is one other thing: confused about the time mail gets picked up.
Here is the sign inside, just above the drop box for letters with postage:
Okay. So mail gets picked up twice each weekday — and both at the tail end of the workday? Twice a day, only 90 minutes apart?
And on Saturday it’s picked up at midnight — that’s 0:00 a.m., right? — just a few hours after the clerks have gone for the day?
But just outside the front door stand two big drop boxes. Here’s what they say:
So there’s an extra pickup outside every day, at 1 p.m.? They can’t go inside then to scoop up the mail? And what goes on between the noon collection on Saturdays, and the indoor collection an hour later?
But wait! There’s more!
One lonely drop box sits at the front of the Playhouse Square parking lot, near Kennedy’s exclusive barber shop. It pre-dates the new post office, but it’s the Holy Grail of Saturday mail:
I can’t explain that 10 a.m. Saturday pickup, or the 3 p.m. weekday one.
But I do understand one thing more clearly now: why employees “go postal.”