Postal Hijinks...

I went to the post office today to mail birthday gifties for 5280 Mommy and the Boy among other things. My usual post office closes at 1pm on Saturdays and since today there was a torrential downpour at lunchtime I wasn't able to leave the house until after the P.O. closed. That meant going to the Princeton Junction Post Office which is "open late for your convenience". This "open late" however is caveated by the fact that final mail pick up is always two hours before they close. Not to mention that the post office is then staffed specifically with people who really don't want to be there. Case in point. I get to the Post Office, package my goodies and then get in line. I'm 6th in line. There's one cashier and she's working out of the postal gift shop, rather than the actual postal window. All five people ahead of me have *lots* of stuff to mail. People keep getting in line. I realize we're going to be here for a while. Then we all kind of notice the loud talking coming from behind the "Passport Office" door. It's clearly a one way conversation (i.e. a phone call) and by the sound of it, not one related to passports or the post office. At about ten after four (yes, ten minutes *after* the post office closed) the manager comes out from the back to finally lock the front door so no one else can get in line (now I'm about third from the front) and she says to everyone in line how sorry she is that we've had to wait and that they close at four and that as we can see they only have one person working. To this I say, "what about the person in the passport office who's been on a personal call for the past fifteen minutes?" The manager looks at me a bit dismayed and says, "oh, no, she's handling passports." and I respond, "it doesn't sound like it." So with that the manager knocks on the door, is told to "hang on a minute" and then she proceeds to open the door and see one employee. No passport people, nothing being taken care of, just Maureen on her cell phone. Surprisingly, both the manager and the lone postal cashier thanked me. I guess Maureen does this a lot.