Petty tyrannies

..late
twenties, early thirties, dark complexion and some variation of Asian ethnicity.
There’s a cheerful bespectacled Asian chap who also mans the counter and
who converses with her in whatever Asian language whom I suspect could be her
father, except for his entirely opposite disposition.
Everything is too much trouble for this woman. I’ve tried all variations
of pleasantness and patience mixed with business-like efficiency, but she’s
already tired of me before I reach the counter.
I reluctantly went to the Pinewood PO today after I’d been into town to
do an interview with Denis Walter and it was simply too late to go anywhere
else. I had some posters to send to the St Andrews pub, which entailed purchasing
a tube to send them in. The last time I’d been there they’d run
out of the small tubes that are the perfect fit for A3 posters and I looked
in vain to see if they’d replenished their stock in the meantime. It appeared
they hadn’t, so I approached the counter to ask if they perhaps had some
out the back.
To my relief the person ahead of me got Ms Wong, so I waited hopefully for one
of the other two to serve me, but somehow they managed to remain preoccupied
until she was free. ‘Yes?’ she said, with the trace of a smile playing
on her lips. I resignedly approached the counter, by which time the smile had
been replaced by a look of profound irritation.
‘Do you have any of the small tubes?’ I ventured. ‘Aren’t
they there?’ she snapped disbelievingly, looking round me to glare pointedly
at the shelves where the errant tubes should have been. ‘There are only
the large and medium sized ones’ I sniveled appealingly. ‘Then we
haven’t got any,’ she said triumphantly, as if she was addressing
a complete moron.
As I turned to flee she intoned an utterly unexpected coup de grace.
‘Sorry,’ she said, and with such laughable insincerity that it nearly
stopped me in my tracks.
There had been a previous encounter with Ms Wong involving posting a tube. I’d
packed it, addressed it and taken it to the counter and as I was paying her
I asked if she could tape up the ends. She looked at me incredulously. ‘Why?’
she asked. I explained to her that there had been an occasion when I’d
sent a tube untaped and it had subsequently arrived at its destination empty.
This was a true story, but she looked at me as if I’d made it up simply
to make her do some extra work and waste everybody’s time. I had to be
quite insistent before she reluctantly taped it up and the next time I was so
nervous about asking her again I allowed her to send the tube off untaped. (It
made its destination OK – I have visions of her sneering ‘I knew
you were making it up!’)
I’ve studied her dealing with other customers and she’s just the same.
She’s not an eye-roller, but if she was they’d be spinning like
a slot machine all day. I’ve come to the conclusion that her behaviour’s
not intentionally rude; in fact she may not even be aware of what she’s
doing. It’s just her way – and God bless her, I say. But, in the meantime,
I shall go out of my way to avoid having to send my posters from the Pinewood
PO..