Neither Rain nor Sleet

I saw the funniest thing after work tonight. I was in the post office waiting to use the self-serve machine that calculates and prints postage for packages. (My sister-in-law Judy is facing the big four-oh next weekend, so I wanted to send her a little reminder of how gravity takes over every ounce of your body after that. Heh-heh.)

When I'd left work several minutes earlier, it was pouring rain, and my clothes were still damp all over from the long run to my car from the office. But by the time I got to the post office, the rain had lightened up quite a bit. I thought, "Well, that's lucky."

Inside the post office, I saw a middle-aged man with a dark beard saunter from one of the work tables to drop a package in the blue drop slot next to the postage machine. He appeared to be of middle-Eastern descent, and his mannerisms displayed just a hint of arrogance. I was speaking with a guy behind me in line as I watched this potentially haughty gentleman head toward the front exit. He stopped in the glass-enclosed vestibule and picked up his cell phone. I watched as he stood facing the parking lot in front of the building and thought to myself, "No way is he doing what I think he's doing."

Sure enough, he immediately reached someone on the phone in his left hand and waved his right hand toward the curb as if giving driving instruction. The post office parking lot is small, so the rear bumper of the car closest to the man was about 12 feet in front of him. Wouldn't you know it--the car directly to the left of that one backed out, drove to the curb, and stopped--in the firelane, no less--to pick up the bearded man. By then the rain was just a drizzle.

How lazy have we become in this modern era if we can't walk twenty feet in the rain? It's bad enough we send email to the co-worker in the office next door to our own, but you gotta admit that calling someone parked right in front of you to pick you up at the curb is crossing the line into severe couch-potatoness. If this guy had been wearing an Armani suit or expensive Italian loafers, maybe, just maybe I'd let him slide and never would've mentioned it here. But he was wearing dress slacks and a button-down shirt. No tie. Nothing fancy.

It's like the other day when a woman pulled into the intersection of two parking lot drive lanes and completely blocked both lanes, including the drive lane directly in front of the Giant supermarket, creating a mini-traffic jam. She sat there, burning gas, waiting for someone to unload their groceries into their trunk and return their cart. There were dozens of open parking spaces she could've used, but this young, perfectly healthy woman with both legs intact had to inconvenience everyone else just to get the space closest to the store instead of a space that was maybe another 20 or 30 feet further from the storefront. She was probably on the way home from her Pilates class.

These silly suburbanites wouldn't last a New York minute living in the city.