USPS

Not going home for Christmas means I got to spend an hour and a half in the post office today, posting parcels home.

I rather like going to the post office here, although the experience isn't that much different from the U.K. Similar long lines, similar range of forms to fill in (never the one you need, and when they do have the one you need, when you get to the counter you'll be told you filled in the wrong one) and similarly bizarre collection of members of the public (there was an elderly gentleman in front of me today wearing a leather jacket and baggy corduroys who kept doing knee bends against the form-filling-in table. People kept looking at me with raised eyebrows, as if I was responsible because I was in the line behind him).

The people who work in the USPS, however, do legitimately seem to be more friendly and cheery than their English counterparts. Today there was a greeter, who was checking people's parcels were parceled correctly and all the appropriate forms were filled. She was genuinely helpful. Plus she was wearing a Father Christmas hat, handing out mints, singing and coochy-cooing babies in pushchairs. Quite a talent. I'm not sure Britain breeds people like that - helpful, we have, cheery, we have. But helpful and cheery and friendly to strangers? Rare, I think.

Havant (my home town) had a post office that was in a huge old fancy building with its own distribution centre and it would send forth whistling postmen on bicycles and in vans. TWICE A DAY you'd get that thunk through the letter box, and the actual post office was staffed with people who knew the names of customers. Then it moved into the shopping centre, which I've written about before, and that didn't work out so well for the Post Office (by that time it was trying to rebrand itself as a Post Office Counter, or something) although it was much brighter and it smelled less. Last time I went back, it had moved out of the shopping center and into a unit on the street that also sold school uniforms and cheap toys and it was hard to see there were some forgotten Post Office staff hidden at the back. I think that pretty much sums up the modern history of the Great British Post Office. It's a sad tale - not really a wearing-Santa-hats-and-singing kind of tale.