This afternoon's long line at the post office seemed to have had only two tax-mailers in it. A skinny woman in expensive clothes mailed a large envelope that she didn't want insured or to have the recipeint sign for it, but she did want "proof it was mailed." A woman with a very old fashioned hair-do shipped about six packages to a member of the armed forces. The clerk helping her had to pause to corret the mistake the next clerk made trying to ring up a money order on a credit card. A man in a sweatshirt returned something to Land's End. The man in line behind me showed his impatience by shifting his weight, sighing loudly, and drumming his fingers on that skinny bar that so many p.o.s have, now, around which the line wraps, and on which people lean to write addresses. I stopped leaning when he started drumming.

(I started writing this because of the obligatory early-news April 15 segment from the Brook Road P.O. Late-breaking news: the (second-rate) post office in Mechanicsville has been evacuated by HAZMAT teams "becasue of a bad smell." Come on.)