Storytime: A Slight Postal Drama

🌟 Episode Highlights

• things all Americans hate
• did someone steal my package?
• what my package contained

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Transcript

Hello, hello! Welcome to English Extras! I’m Jean, and this is the podcast that takes you beyond textbook English. If you’re tired of boring grammar drills and dry vocabulary lists and you want to sound more natural, more you, then you’re in the right place. Every episode is packed with real-world English, cultural tips, and smart strategies to boost your fluency. So, are you ready? Let’s learn some English.

Today’s episode is not a lesson, although you will learn plenty of new vocabulary. Today I’m telling you about a little…situation I had to deal with last week. It’s a storytime!

There are three things in this world that are almost universally hated: jury duty, the DMV, and the post office. Perhaps these are only part of American culture, but I think a version of all of these exist in most countries. I’ll explain each one, then I’m going to tell you which one I had to deal with this past week. 

So, jury duty. What is that? It’s a mandatory responsibility of citizens to serve as part of a jury when called upon to do so. In the American Constitution, the fifth and sixth amendments require people accused of crimes to be tried in a court of law by a jury of their peers.

Now, that’s a lot of what we would call “legalese.” The legal system is practically its own language. To be tried means to appear in—in other words, participate in—a court because someone says you committed a crime and you say you didn’t. A trial is the process of determining if someone is guilty of that crime or not guilty of that crime. A jury is a group of people who listen to each side of the argument and the jury renders a verdict. A verdict is a decision, saying guilty or not guilty. When we talk about verdict, we often use the verb “to render” which basically means to deliver or give. A jury renders a verdict. Specifically, a jury of your peers. A peer is someone who is more or less equal to you in society, not just a bunch of rich people or a bunch of lawyers or anything like that. The jury is selected randomly from the eligible citizens in your local area and then there’s a selection process, lots of questions–honestly, the whole thing is long and tedious.

The subject of jury duty could be its own episode, but that’s the general explanation. 

Everyone hates jury duty. As much as it’s a civic duty and as much as the city government tries to dress it up as an honor, nobody really enjoys it because it’s just an inconvenience to everyone.

The second thing everyone hates is the DMV. DMV is an acronym. An acronym is a series of letters that represent a longer phrase. Each letter is the first letter in each word in the phrase. So in this case, DMV is an acronym that stands for Department of Motor Vehicles. The DMV is responsible for administering–meaning, giving–motor vehicle registrations and driver’s licenses.

Literally everyone I’ve ever met hates going to the DMV. It’s so universally hated, in fact, that there’s a joke about it in the Disney movie Zootopia. If you’ve seen Zootopia, do you remember the scene where Judy and Nick go to the DMV? Judy is in a big hurry and she’s shocked to see that all the workers at the DMV are sloths. This is some clever commentary about how people view the DMV.

The third thing everyone hates? Going to the post office. 

Something I just noticed is that all three of these things are part of city government. So maybe everyone just hates government? I don’t know. That sounds like a solid possibility. 

Anyways, I digress. 

The post office is responsible for shipping and delivering people’s mail. For whatever reason, every post office I’ve ever been to has been old, dirty, depressing, and the workers are typically grumpy and rude. Nobody is happy to be there. 

In fact, we have a very depressing expression in America: going postal. I don’t want to describe it here, because the origin is very sad and violent, but it is related to the post office and if you’re curious, you can look it up on your own. 

So, I had to go to the post office last week. 

Let me explain why. 

I ordered some books. To be precise, I ordered six books and they were being delivered in two packages: four books in one package and two books in the other. 

Well, I was super excited for these books, so I was psyched when I checked the tracking information and saw an update that my packages were out for delivery. That means I was going to get them that day. 

The mail carrier—the person who delivers the mail to my mailbox—usually arrives around noon or one. So around 11:30, I started somewhat obsessively checking the status of my packages to see if they had been delivered. Every five to ten minutes, I refreshed the page. No change. 

Before my first afternoon class, I went to check the mail anyway because who knows?! Maybe it was delivered but it was slow to update! Nope. No packages. 

So I taught my afternoon classes and asked my husband to check the mail when he got home later that afternoon.

One of my packages arrived! One, but not both. I was so confused because they should have arrived together, at the same time. 

Well, later there was an update to the tracking status. It said “delivered”! But it also said “individual picked up at postal facility.” That sounds like a person picked up my package at the post office. A regular person, not a worker, because it said “delivered.” 

I was so confused. What did this mean? Did someone else have my package? Did the post office give my package to someone else? Was my package just…gone?

I was so incredibly bummed. Bummed meaning disappointed. Yes, they’re just books, and they weren’t very expensive because I bought all of these books used, secondhand. But I was so excited for these books. They were all about language topics that I am really interested in. I didn’t buy them for no reason. 

So I thought my books were gone and I thought I lost the money as well because the seller wasn’t at fault, so they wouldn’t want to give me my money back. 

Then I went online. I Googled this phrase from the tracking update: individual picked up at postal facility. I ended up on Reddit. If you don’t already know, Reddit is an online forum where you can post questions or comment about every topic imaginable and it can all be completely anonymous. 

There was a Reddit post about this exact topic. It seemed that this was a fairly common problem that had happened to a lot of people. Many of the people actually got their packages in the end even though they had to wait a little bit sometimes. 

So I had a little bit of hope. 

I decided to go to the post office in person. I thought that it would be easier to go to a physical, in-person location and explain versus trying to talk to someone on the phone, if it was even possible to talk to a person on the phone! Sometimes it isn’t possible to talk to a real person. Also, some Reddit users mentioned that when they went physically to their post office, sometimes the post office gave them their package right then and there. 

So I went to my local post office. 

My local post office opens, according to Google, at 9AM. I arrived at 9:01 but when I walked in, there were already eight people in line! Eight! And of course there was only one worker. 

It was a sad place. It’s an old building. Everything was old and dirty. It smelled a little weird. I didn’t want to touch anything. It felt like a prison. 

Well, the one good thing was that the worker was actually really nice! I showed her the tracking information on my phone and explained that the status—individual picked up at postal facility—was strange because no one in my household picked it up. 

She said that it was likely a computer error. She also said that it actually happens quite often because the post office’s technology is old and sometimes unreliable. (Looking around at the building, I believed it. It looked like it hadn’t changed in 30 years.) 

Then she told me—to my absolute relief—that my package should arrive later that same day. If it didn’t, she told me I could come back the next day and I could speak to a supervisor. 

So I went home and waited. I couldn’t check the tracking to see if it had arrived yet because the tracking was incorrect. I checked my mailbox at one o’clock. Nothing. 

I went home. I taught a class. I waited some more.

I checked again at three o’clock. And it was there! It was actually finally there! I had the books in my hands. 

I practically skipped back to my house, I was so happy. 

Probably you wouldn’t be as happy as I was about these books, unless you’re really interested in languages. If you’re curious, the books I got are:

The Etymologicon by Mark Forsyth. Etymology is the study of word origins. This book starts with a particular word, explains the origin, and then connects it to another word, explaining the origin of that word, and connecting it to another, and on and on, creating an interconnected web of words!

I also got The Prodigal Tongue by Lynne Murphy. This book is about British versus American English and the stereotypes that each have about the other. I’m surrounded by British English because my husband’s parents are British. My husband speaks with an American accent but includes a lot of British vocabulary, expressions, and grammar in his everyday speech. So I’m curious to learn more about this from a scholarly view. 

I also got The Greatest Invention by Silvia Ferrara. This book is about writing. Specifically the invention of various writing systems all over the world. I don’t know much about language from a writing point of view and I know this book will teach me a lot about that topic. 

I also got Other Wordly by Yee-Lum Mak. This is a collection of words and expressions specific to their native languages. For example, to tartle. This is a Scots word that means “to hesitate while introducing or meeting someone because you have forgotten their name.” We don’t have a word for this in English. It’s beautifully illustrated and I think I will really enjoy browsing this on slow Sunday afternoons. 

I also got The Language Hoax by John McWhorter. This book argues that languages don’t really influence how we see the world. It’s a book offering a counterargument to other books like Through the Language Glass by Guy Deutscher, which I also have already. I’m so excited to see both sides of this debate about whether or not the language you speak influences the way you think about and see the world. 

Finally, I got The Myth of Mars and Venus by Deborah Cameron. This is a book exploring if men and women speak differently. This is one of the first books I’ve come across exploring language from the point of view of gender, so I’m really looking forward to learning more. 

So those are all the books I got and the little drama that surrounded their arrival. I went to the post office and lived to tell the tale. When you live to tell the tale, it means you survived the event you were talking about. 

Thank you for joining me for this little storytime. I hope you enjoyed it.

As always, thanks for being here, my friends! Until next time! Bye!