That’s what it’s supposed to mean, but if one doesn’t already know what “girth” means, one could easily misinterpret “thickest part” to mean the longest dimension. But girth is actually the distance around the two shorter dimensions.
Actually, I’ve been generally happy with the service I’ve gotten at my local post office. Other than the website being a little less clear than it could be in a few places, I have no problem with them.
Post office employees…“wage slaves”? Nuh uh, you must be thinking of someone who works at McDonald’s or some such. Postal employees make very good money for what they do. Unless my interpretation of “wages slaves” is off somehow.
I’m a postal employee, and that’s news to me. Admittedly I don’t work in a post office as such, but they are on similar rates there. The money is, of course, better than McDonald’s, but so is most people’s, and it’s most decidedly not a stellar income. It’s just like working in a bank or something (with the exception that post offices tend to get held up more often as soft targets).
It’s just another working class retail job where you have to try to be polite to boorish, uninformed arseholes day in day out, and juggle those people who dislike seeing you do anything other than man the service counter with an uptight little micro-managing spiv of a boss who will yell at you if the shelves aren’t stacked, and the mail hasn’t be processed on time. They have a lot to do besides customer service. I’d say “wage slave” is an appropriate term to use.
Get over yourself, man. Bitching about the post office is downright American. Why do you hate America, lissener?
And please. The post office does not have shitty customer service so they can keep their prices low. That’s ridiculous. They’re not Walmart, for chrissakes. They have shitty customer service because they can. Where the hell else are you gonna go to mail your package? There’s no competition! It’s a freaking government agency! When have you ever gotten spectacular service at a government agency? They have you by the nuts and they know it.
And post office employees are most certainly not wage slaves. That is beyond stupid. Government employees have it pretty damn good compared to a lot of people. Nice benefits, healthy pension, have to practically ax-murder someone to get your ass fired. Very competitive pay. Government work is one of the few industries that a person without a lot of education can support themselves nicely.
UPS or Fedex?
Okay, just checked and a newly hired postal worker earns 17.66 as of November of 2005, with the top of the pay scale being 23.05. Not great, but a far cry from McDonalds. I write and research legal motions and make less than the top paid postal carrier.
And their union has negotiated health insurance premiums that are *way * less than the rest of the Federal government. About half, depending on which plan you choose. I’m not complaining–even though I pay twice as much as a postal worker for the exact same coverage, I appreciate the availability of good health insurance plan.
Print them? Yes.
Use them? Last time I tried, the lady at the Post Office refused to believe that the USPS does such a thing, and made me write the address on the box with a dried up sharpie instead of using the labels I printed from usps.com and brought with me.
Um, “wage slave” doesn’t mean underpaid; it means you’re paid to be a slave. It means assholes like the ones in this thread think because they’re “paying your salary,” that gives them the right to nail you to their “the customer is always right” cross, when in fact the customer is almost always an asshole.
The windows aren’t closed because they’re lazy; they’re closed because if all of them were staffed, with tag teams ready to step in so there was no interruption of service when one of them needs to pee, your first class stamp would cost $42.
The one that really set me off is the one that complained about people going to lunch when they should have been helping people who didn’t want to stand in line. I can’t tell you how many times I worked well past my break, at the zoo this summer, because the lines were long, until I was ready to shoot myself and the next customer–and until the breaks were getting backed up, because, yes, we do try to cover for each other. WELL past my break, a couple of hours or more, until it became clear that the lines were just gonna be long because it was a summer saturday, and people were just gonna have to wait in line, and fuck you all but I’m not gonna hold my pee another couple of hours just because you decided to go to the zoo on the busiest day of the year.
Do you people really think that all lunch breaks should be suspended for the duration of the Christmas mailing season?
What a bunch of fucking assholes you all are.
Lissener, you can go fuck yourself with a frozen cactus. I don’t give a shit what challenges you have been having in your job at the zoo, but it’s obvious you have no frigging clue about the Post Office - it makes USPS look like the elite ninja postal storm-troopers of curtesy. This isn’t about the Christmas mailing season, it isn’t about lunch breaks, it isn’t about fine fucking dining.
Walk into ANY large post office in the UK at ANY time of day at ANY time of the year, and you will find:
[ul]
[li]Filthy torn ragged carpet, strange smells, dirty peeling walls and god knows how many germs[/li][li]A huge row of windows, mostly closed[/li][li]A giant queue of miserable ‘customers’ waiting to have their items lost and misdirected, to collect things which have not been delivered for some arbitrary reason, or to process any of numerous government forms which they like to channel via the post office for some reason[/li][li]A vast range of overpriced crap ranging from postcards to hairdryers which the Post Office is trying to flog to the poor deranged morons queuing to have their sanity violated at the counter[/li][li]Mountains of post which is in the process of being damaged, lost, stolen or redirected to the wrong location[/li][li]Employees who range from rude surly proto-primates to the little old man who’s been working there so long that he has long since lost touch with sanity, but has memorized every postal rate since victorian times, and will speed your parcel on its way with flawless efficiency if you don’t mind him drooling on it and telling you about his nephews trainset at length.[/li][/ul]
I don’t even expect the Post Office to equal McDonalds in terms of cleanliness, efficiency and competence, because that would be totally unrealistic. I’d settle for them being about competent as the local Tennessee Fried Chicken or Mustafa’s Kebab House.
It’s a fucking POST OFFICE for gods sake - posting a letter or a parcel shouldn’t feel like it’s a voyage of discovery into strange new lands of untested technology, the concept is hundreds of years old.
Makes no difference what month of the year you go to the PO.
There are always more closed than open windows.
Oh and fuck you
I’m just trying to work out what gleamingly raw nerve the OP touched upon to get such a response from lissener?
Pointing out that having 1/4 of the windows open for service in a central post office at 9.30 in the morning is enough to be called an “entitled asshole”. Suggesting that early/late lunch breaks would make sense for staff in a role where many other people can only visit during standard lunch hours is asking someone to be a slave?
What a splendidly tantrumish response to a mild OP. I’d previously considered mentioning an incident of sheer stupidity from the counter staff at my local post office but I’d be concerned that lissener might have a seizure.
Go for it! 
I wouldn’t go that far, but I do see lissener’s point. During this time of year, post offices can see a constant stream of business from the time they open until the time they close. There are days when there is never a “slow time” when they could go take their breaks or have lunch.
I don’t know their rules there, but it could be such a thing that they have to take their breaks at a certain time. Some people also have medical conditions where they can’t put off eating. I agree that it would be smarter to have extra people manning the windows during the lunch hour, but if they’re short-staffed, it might be impossible.
Lissa See post 32.
I saw it. They might be short-staffed year-round. A lot of state agencies have faced budget cutbacks-- I don’t see that the post office would be all that different.
Well, go into the small ones, then.
Except don’t go into my local one if you’re in a hurry. They’re so desperate for human contact, they won’t let you go without at least three attempts to strike up a long conversation. One about the weather, one about how difficult it is to remember a four digit number to use your bank cards, and one about some random article in the local paper.
So, considering all the fast food restaurants and similar that manage to schedule people’s lunchbreaks so that they make sure they have as many tills open as possible during a busy period such as lunchtime, you still posit that for some reason this is not possible for an organisation such as a post office, or a bank?
It’s funny really. I worked a number of bars and restaurants which had some pretty simple ways of dealing with this. For instance, you might start at 8, receive a 30 minute break sometime between 10.30 and 11.30, then receive a further 30 minute break sometime between 2 and 3, then back to work for a short afternoon stint. Seemed fairly common sense really - make sure your staff aren’t taking breaks when your customers are most likely to be coming in.
In short, I find it hard to credit the idea that a policy such as this is either hard to implement when there’s thousands of places that already do it.
If you think you can compare working in a bar to working at a post office during christmas season, or a zoo at the height of summer, your head is farther up your ass than I’d’ve thought possible.
This is about customer’s and their need to feel that attention is being paid to them; it’s not about the staffing issues of a place like the PO (or the zoo, for that matter).
Nowadays I’m working at a video store. On Friday and Saturday nights, when it gets busy, we have 4 people on staff instead of the usual two. We have two registers; the extra two are because A) people need their breaks, and B) manning a register is not the only work that needs to be done. So even when both registers are going non-stop, if a customer has to wait in a frikkin line for 3 frikkin minutes, god forbid she catches sight of a third or fourth employee NOT helping her. I might be labelling new videos to put on the shelves, or balancing last week’s register drawers, or whatever. But if she’s gotta stand in line for one second, she’ll catch my eye and give me that “Hello? Customer here!” look, or actually say “Can’t you check me out?” or something. Again, both registers are going white hot, but she can’t stand the thought of a wage slave not actually prioritizing her immediate needs over the general needs of keeping the operation running.
I’ll say, “Both registers are open, I’m sure they’ll get to you as soon as possible,” and she’ll roll her eyes and let loose a sigh that says–wait, lemme C&P–“Lazy buggers at the [del]Post Office[/del] video store.”
Fuck her, and fuck you. Trust me; the staff at the PO would rather have you dealt with and through the door than have you standing there, not knowing what the fuck you’re talking about, assuming they’re lazy just because you have to wait in the fucking line in the middle of the fucking christmas mailing season.
What a bunch of oblivious fucks.