Going Postal

So, I fell of the Blog bandwagon for a bit there- sorry! Good news, though. I just had the strangest thing happen to me!

My coworker, Richard, handles the parking downtown, but when he's out I have to cover for him some. I can't really do much but take payment so most of the time people have to just come back. But anyhow. We get a lot of crazies who come in, as you can imagine. Today, it was the Postman. Now, our Postman is strange on a normal day. The guy sometimes doesn't feel like coming upstairs to deliver mail, so he'll give it to someone else in the building and tell them to give it to us when they see us. Today he came to the office.

Apparently, he had just received a parking ticket for facing the wrong way. If you didn't know (I learned the hard way at LSU), you can not park against the flow of traffic. It's a law in most states. But he did, and he wanted me to "fix" his ticket for him. First of all, I don't have that authority, second of all I'm just not going to do it and third of all, we have made the Mayor, City Manager, three County Commissioners and half of the police department pay tickets. So why would he get out of his?

I kindly (yes, I really was nice) informed him I couldn't do that and how to appeal if he liked. This seemed to upset him somewhat, and he flew into a tangent about how awful I, personally, was, how awful the DIB was, how everyone hated us and then... that I couldn't possibly believe in Jesus because I wouldn't fix his ticket. Yes, REALLY! That was not a good thing to say to me. But I calmly (yes, I promise, I was calm!) told him that I most certainly did believe in Jesus, but that Jesus didn't have anything to do with his parking ticket. Well, that just set him off again. He was still yelling at me about the state of my Christianity when I told him (not so kindly) that if he hated downtown so much he was welcome to deliver mail elsewhere and escorted him out. Needless to say, I was in a major snit! When my boss returned, he informed me that our Postman was the reason the phrase, "Going Postal" was invented.

I finally shook it off and had started to find the whole thing kind of funny when the postman returned... with a bouquet of flowers! He apologized, informing me that God told him he was being a hypocrite and "In Jesus," he loved me. I told him I forgave him, mostly because I was a little afraid!

I'm not sure whether to think he has a problem and be sympathetic or just to be afraid of him.

And no, I did not apologise for telling him he could deliver his mail elsewhere, because I really would be OK with it if he did!