Progress

Quite a nifty renovation they’ve done down at the local post office, don’t you think?

Well, um, actually, no, not really.

Why?

Let’s start off with the exterior. The clock with a face but no hands is still there. Now I am assured— and this is a Times Exclusive—that it will regain its hands shortly. But in the meantime, it sits, as it has for the last umpteen years, a forlorn reminder of a bureaucracy that doesn’t really care that much about a small rural post office.

And then there’s that cold metal plate against the wall right underneath the not-a-clock. I asked at the desk why we had to bring our mail inside to drop it off now, and I was told there is supposed to be a sidewalk mailbox coming in, but it’s on ‘back order’. A mailbox, on back order at the post office? That’s like Canadian Tire being out of tires, or Chapters being out of books: that’s your stock in trade. Why start a renovation knowing you can’t deliver one?

In the meantime, the message is unspoken but clear. “No, we don’t want you dropping off your mail here; we’ve had a bad experiences in the past with you trying to mail a parcel to your Aunt Gladys in Timmins, so you’d better come inside and get it weighed properly. And yes, you should feel guilty about mailing a letter with an ordinary stamp. Do you know what the real cost of mail delivery is?” Or something like that.

On the positive side, the accessible door now opens in a way that actually makes the building accessible. Well done.

Moving inside, I get a little more worked up. I must say the mailboxes look very nice and bright and shiny new. And the keys work just fine. But is my mail any less crumpled than it was before? I also notice that the handy shelf and garbage/recycling bins have disappeared. Is this because Canada Post refuses to acknowledge that anything it mails to us deserves to be thrown out? The opportunity to instantaneously offload jetsam was a real convenience that I will miss.

And that takes me to my real beef: the notice board. It’s not completely gone, but it’s shrivelled, and its been put under glass. To me, that is like sticking a dagger into the heart of the community. I realize there are also notice boards at the Bank of Nova Scotia and the Foodland, and that other local merchants generously agree to affix event posters in their windows and dutifully take them down as well. But the post office notice board was the ‘go-to’ place for information you could count on about the latest concert, garage sale, euchre tournament, Dukes game or what have you.

I enjoyed the polite anarchy of the notice board. It always kind of outgrew its allotted space: I never saw anyone stick a coming event notice over somebody else’s notice, unless the other event was over, in which case you were simply doing your colleague a favour by covering over their notice. No, instead what you did was— maybe with a slight overlap—add your notice to the spreading margin of the notice board. This was civility at work, and besides, it added to the buzz in the community: wow, you would think, there’s a heck of a lot going on here. I’d better download this to the back of my hydro bill using my MacPencil OS4.2 in case I forget it before I get home. And if the price to be paid for an overflowing notice board was a little peeled paint and a few pinholes in the drywall, who really cared when the obvious greater good was a more vibrant community, and more heavily attended pie auctions?

And now? A glass panel, marking an area of defined length and width, and already filled, separates us from our community notices, which makes it all seem a little more distant. And it makes me a tad more reluctant to bring my notice to the board, because I probably have to go through some sort of ‘Soviet citizens notice approval panel’ before I get permission to put my notice up. “Just what will you be selling at this so-called garage sale?” they will ask. “Wasn’t it pretty stupid of you to buy it in the first place if you’re selling it again so soon? Didn’t your wife warn you you didn’t need another toaster oven? And weren’t you the guy who tried to sneak an overweight envelope by with a regular stamp about six weeks ago? No. Permission denied.”

Now I’m not pinning any of this on the staff of the local post office: every one of them is sweet and helpful. I’m sure it goes right to the top of the organization. But what I am suggesting is a little bit of civil disobedience. Maybe, if I stake them to a souvlaki at the Plaza Restaurant, a flash mob from our local Lion’s Club can erect a new and even more spacious bulletin board that will run the length of the mailbox room. Or maybe we can just continue putting our notices on the wall and taking our chances that we’ll anger Canada Post for ruining its paint job.

Or maybe, just maybe, if I promised Canada Post that I would use the correct postage from now on, and stop making fun of its not-a-clock, it would put the bulletin board (and the shelf and the garbage/recycling can), back where they were before. That would be real progress.

David Simmonds’s writing is also available at www.grubstreet.ca.