I Heart My Mail Carrier

We have one of those Amazon credit cards that gives you a little Amazon gift certificate for $25 every so often when you've spent a hell of a lot of money. Hubbster and I take turns spending the certificates, and finally it was my turn again. (It seemed to take a really long time, but that's probably a good thing as far as our budget's concerned.) Since fun-reading is way too dangerous for me before the dissertation is done, for a long time now (that is, since the day I got the last volume of my favorite book, Neil Gaiman's Sandman) these Amazon certificates have been exclusively designated for knitting books. I can't justify knitting books otherwise, but Hubbster and I (both of us INTENSE bibliophiles) decided from the start that the certificates could and should only be spent on pure-fun books, on the theory that this would keep us from rationalizing spending money on non-PhD-related books any other time. (Believe it or not - especially after you read the sentence that's about to come - it really has worked, though that's also because we already own more books than we can possibly read and have had to move them FOUR times just since we've been living together.)

This time I went a teensy bit over the amount of the certificate, but justified it by the fact that I've been tutoring for extra cash very regularly lately, and we haven't been spending said cash, and...well...I was helpless when I realized that the two knitting books I was debating between for the gift certificate purchase were so drastically marked down by Amazon that I could get them both by going only $11 over the certificate amount. Free shipping. What's a girl to do, I ask you?

And then comes the waiting time. I forced myself to wait for several days without checking the shipping status or asking Hubbster "when do you think it might come?" more than once or twice. Until this morning, when I finally felt justified in logging onto Amazon to see if they'd shipped it yet. And they had! Today was the first day I could possibly expect it. But, of course, I've lived in NYC almost 8 years now and I know perfectly well that it can take as much as a week for mail to get from one part of Manhattan to another, if it ever gets there at all. I've seen my local postal employees gleefully taunting irate customers when their mail got "lost." So I didn't want to get my hopes up. On the other hand, we've recently moved into a new postal zone. I have a deep, abiding love for our new postal zone. The people at this post office (which is not at all in a "nice" much less rich neighborhood, I would like to point out) are NICE. Like - suburban nice. But they're also BEYOND COMPETENT. In fact, they rock. They know everything, they ask the right questions, they answer questions promptly and thoroughly. They're friendly as all get-out even when there's a bit of a line (and there's never more than a bit of a line). Their astonishingly un-postal-like magnificence has - frankly - caused Hubbster to get a little jealous. I'm more than a little in love with the whole postal establishment here at Ft. George. Sometimes, I go there in person even when I don't absolutely have to, just to remind myself that I'm not making it up.

But, even though we haven't had the slightest trouble yet with getting mail here in our building, and we got fast deliveries even before xmas, and they handled the mail-hold while were gone magnificently even though we didn't notify them until the last minute, but...I still wasn't sure...perhaps I was afraid to believe we could be this lucky...that the carriers were every bit as kick-ass as the people we see in the post office itself. We haven't been here long, so even though I've seen a couple different carriers in passing and they seemed very nice, I really had no basis to judge.

And then - there was a knock on the door.

He brought me these:





It's so cold outside that the books, after unpacking them, are icy to the touch. Yet my postal carrier arrived with a smile on his face. And when I said, "I was hoping you'd come today!" He said, "I knew you were hoping, so I made sure to get here." I asked him if he minded delivering in this cold, and he said, "No, not at all. I'm warm," while gesturing at his thick uniform coat.

What a wonderful, wonderful world it is.

So far I've only had a chance to page through the books, but they make my heart race, really they do.


Oh, gosh, I had a lot of work planned for the rest of today. What are the chances? I will do my best to resist the call...at least for a few more hours...