Ridiculous of the Day.

Wanna hear the most the most ridiculous thing that happened to me today? Too bad, I'm gonna tell you anyway.

So there I was, delivering mail, as I tend to do 5-6 days a week in order to not have to live with my parents, which is cruel and unusual in nature, and a horror worse than death. It's not the most exciting job in the universe, but it pays the bills, and I don't typically have to talk to anyone to do it. I'm not big on talking to people, never have been, and probably never will be. I'm plenty articulate when I have time to write out my thoughts and such, but not so much when I don't. That and I have recently found out I have some sort of anti-social disorder thingy *shrug* I s'pose there's some sort of drug that I could take for that, but the last medication I took for long term made my hairline recede and messed with my short term memory something crazy.

So anyway, there I was, delivering mail. I was at a community box unit, (or CBU for short) one of those big gray plastic things that has all the mailboxes for a single street in it. I opened it up, and started tossing letters into boxes, hopefully the correct ones. When you're lost in your thoughts sometimes you tend to chuck things into the wrong boxes. It was taking a while because the volume of mail has started its holiday climb into insanity. I was there a good five minutes or so, absorbed in the audiobook I was listening to on my iPod (Deathstalker Honor, dramatized *some sort of dramatic sound effect*) I was just about to finish up, only had two or three boxes left to chuck letters into, when a shadow fell across me.

This often happens. People will see the mail truck and come out to loom over you while you're trying to work even though when asked about how they feel when someone is looking over their shoulder while they're trying to work they'll say they feel uncomfortable... hypocrites! This time it was not a person, but a horse. Yes, a real, actual, horse. It was all saddled up and everything, with no rider anywhere in sight. Mr. Ed proceeded to nose his way into the mailbox and try to pull the mail out of my hands with his teeth. He soon let go when he realized that paper tastes like crap, but I do not envy Devin Garret the horse slobber he will have to deal with whilst opening his social security check.

The horse and I looked at each other for a few seconds. I wasn't exactly sure what to do about it. I mean, a stray dog is easy to deal with, give animal control a call and there you go, but what do you do about a stray horse? The horse nosed me a bit, obviously wondering why I wasn't being very friendly, then wandered off and began grazing on someone's lawn. I figured that was good enough for government work and went on my way.

And, believe it or not, that is not the only ridiculous thing that happened to me today. I have another story to tell as well.

So there I was, delivering mail, as I tend to do 5-6 days a week in order to not have to live with my parents, which is cruel and unusual in nature, and a horror worse than death. It's not the most exciting job in the universe, but it pays the bills, and... well, you know that part already.

So there I was, delivering mail. I was at an apartment complex. If you've ever lived in an apartment, you know how the mailboxes work. If not, all of the mailboxes for the entire complex are typically in one central location. Some apartments have CBUs, others have custom multi-unit boxes (CMUBs for short) which areusually just a huge wall of mailboxes, divided into sections of 30 or so.

I have learned, in my 8 years of being a mailman, that if you bundle all mail for a CBU together with a rubber band and set it on top of the box that it goes to when there are more than one at a stop, it keeps people from asking you if you've delivered their box yet or not, because they can see that either, yes, there is no mail on top of my box so he must have finished, or no, there's still mail there so i'll come back later.

This particular apartment complex has 20 CBUs all lined up in a line. I got out, set all my 20 bundles of mail atop the boxes and started delivering starting at the left of the line. I was about halway through when a young man, probably in his late teens or early twenties walked up.

Now, I know that it's a bad thing to judge a person at a glance, but don't lie, we all do it. This guy had a ridiculous haircut that he likely thought looked cool with enough grease in it to make a Big Mac sigh in envy, and his pants wich were at least seven sizes too big for him were practically sagging down to his ankles. His face was covered with patchy, sparse stubble that he might have actually convinced himself into believing was a beard and had the strutting sort of walk of someone who is too stupid to realize how stupid he looks. My first thought upon seeing him was, something along the lines of "what's up, brain doner; walking funny because your pants are down or are you just happy to see me?"

This young man came to a stop before the very last box in the row. He looked at his box, then to the mail on top of it, then to the mail truck, then to me. He repeated the ritual a few more times. I was too amused by his behavior to say anything to him, so I kept working and watched him out of the corner of my eye. I finished with one box, closed it up, and moved to the next box to my right. I clear sign to anyone that missed the mail atop the boxes as to which direction I'm working in.

The young man stood there looking completely dumbfounded. I could hear the rasping of his fingernail as he idly scratched the line of his jaw, considering what to do with all the intensity and determination of a second grader working out his very first multiplication problem at school. slowly, hesitantly, he reached out with his key and opened his mailbox to find that it was empty. No big surprise to anyone with half a brain, but it was obviously not what he was expecting.

He stared in confusion at his empty box, then up to the bundle of mail atop the CBU, to the mail truck, to me working my way slowly toward him, and back to his box again. Again I heard the rasping of his fingernails on stubble as he idly scratched at his jaw in concentration. I could see a realization building in him. He was almost there, sooner or later the clouds would part and the sun would shine through.

But it was not to be. My faith in his ability to figure things out on his own faded away to nothing when he turned to me and asked, "hey, dude, have you delivered to this box yet?"

I gave him a flat stare that he obviously found to be rather intimidating. I'm told that I can be intimidating at times, which I have always found rather odd because I'm not exactly very tall. I attribute this to my times in grade school when, to avoid the mockery of bullies, I learned to keep my face completely expressionless, which in turn began to frighten some of them away, so it worked out awesomely for me then. The problem is that once you start keeping any and all emotion from your face it is very hard to stop, and most attempts seem really rather awkward to those around you.

Anyway, I gave him a flat start that seemed to intimidate him. He took a step back from me with a bit of fear in his eyes. I'm not a fan of stupidity, but I also remember what it's like to be afraid of someone who wants nothing more than to make you as miserable as possible for no other reason than that they can. I don't particularly enjoy frightening people. My solution to this, raise an eyebrow. As I said before, I'm not exactly articulate on the spot, and it was the only expression I could summon on short notice.

"Seriously," I asked him. "You seriously can't tell?"

The young man shrugged uncomfortably and asked, "well . . . have you?"

"What does it look like," I asked. I do not believe in indulging stupidity. If someone is acting like a complete and utter retard I'm going to make them suffer for it, and maybe come up with the right conclusion on their own while they're at it.

"Well, it's box 11D, right here," he replied, pointing to the box, "I guess it's kinda rectangular and, you know, a mailbox . . . like the rest of them . . .?"

He made it sound like a question, as if he wasn't quite sure that his mailbox was, indeed, a mailbox. I wonder what he thought it might have suddenly become, a portal to another universe perhaps? An all you can eat buffet? A shopping mall?

If my hands weren't full I would probably have facepalmed at that. He thought I meant what his mailbox looked like? Seriously, how dumb can a person get? The problem was, that he was still standing there, and still too stupid to undertand that I had not delivered his mail yet. So how, exactly do you go about resolving this problem? Tell him right out and indulge his stupidity? That's not my style. Let him just stand there like the retard he is and ignore him until I get done and drive away? That course of action has its merits, I suppose, but then you have to have him watching you while you finish up, which is decidedly annoying. You can't just tell him he's too stupid to live and you wonder how he conjured up enough brain power to breathe, that sort of thing can get a person fired. So how, then, do you resolve this?

Well, as I was pondering how to tell him he was retarded in the least insulting way possible, he just sort of wandered off like a cat that has suddenly lost interest in whatever it was doing, leaving his mailbox hanging wide open.

And the moral of this story is, don't do drugs, drugs are bad, m'kay?