Driving Class

It’s been a long week so far. Since Monday I’ve been sitting in a training room with a group of 10-20 new postal employees (some sessions have more attendees than others.) We’ve learned about the postal service, safety, benefits, and today we learned about driving. They showed us all the different types of trucks that the postal service uses, explained the differences, and went through all kinds of safety scenarios.

On the drive home I tested myself. I pretended I was taking a driving test and maneuvered everything according to the rules that were outlined in the training session. Doing so accomplished two things: 1) It kept me awake. I had to leave home at 6am all week, and I’m so not used to hours like this. 2) It showed me that I have some really good driving habits. Sure Shawn thinks I’m a bad bad driver, and sometimes I have been known to believe him, but today I found that the things we talked about in class – looking both ways before entering an intersection, even when you have a green light, holding your braking foot over the brake peddle when doing so, keeping a long enough distance between you and the car in front of you – are all things I normally do. Thanks to my excessively-cautious dad, I have developed some great skills.

Sure I’m the old lady on the highway who actually follows the speed limit, who lets everyone ahead of her in traffic because she doesn’t insist on riding *on* cars in front of her, and who slows to a complete stop at stop signs and red lights, but for once, all this will work to my advantage. You *do* know you’re supposed to stop at a red light before proceeding on the right turn with caution, don’t you? Yeah, no one actually does it. I don’t know why I’m surprised when people honk their horns at me for stopping with my blinker on.

Tomorrow we go back for five more hours of driving class. FIVE MORE HOURS. God only knows what we could talk about for five more hours. I honestly think we will have completely exhausted the subject of driving by the time this training class is over.

From there, there’s more training, but I have yet to receive a schedule on that. There will be a road test that consists of street driving and a closed-course cone maneuvering thing. Some people are taking the test tomorrow after class. I’m hoping I’m among those so I can get it over with. If I don’t pass, this whole thing is over. I have to apply for a non-driving position, and honestly, I don’t want one of those. And I really don’t want to go through these orientation sessions again.

Pray for me, please.

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my favorite pen

I know, I said I promised to write *each-and-every-day* in December. I did say that. But apparently I’m not the best with making promises and sticking to them. It’s been several days – and finally I’ve returned to write something.

There were all kinds of plans I had, too. Big Writing Plans. All listed neatly in my writing book, which travels with me everywhere I go. You see the intention is to write worthwile things in that book whenever I have a moment in my day, and then when I get home I am supposed to come here and enter entry after entry of wordy goodness. I had plans to write about my old job, working in the place where cars and licensed, dealing with people who don’t understand that there are certain rules that need to be followed, otherwise you don’t get a title. And that if those rules weren’t followed the first time around, and you didn’t get a title that time, but instead you received a letter explaining why said title was never issued, and then you proceeded to ignore said letter, that it really isn’t my fault. There’s absolutely no way it’s my fault.

And when you come in on a Saturday when the line is two hours long, you need to just shut up and be patient. Don’t show up on the last day before penalties start to accrue and expect me to help you when you’ve missed your number. If you miss your number because you went to eat lunch, do you really think it’s fair for me to help you when all those other people *pointing* sitting out there have been patiently waiting for their numbers to be called? If everyone went to eat lunch and returned at their leisure that would pretty much defeat the purpose of the number system, now wouldn’t it?

Do people think before they open their mouths?

“You need an emissions test before I can issue you plates in this st–”

She interrupts, “So where would I get an emissions test?”

“Do you know where blah blah is?”

Blank stare.

Okay, I have a map. Right here is where we are. And here (marking with my pen) is where emissions is.”

“Where do I get a driver’s license?”

“Here. (pointing again.)”

“So when can I get plates.”

“After you go to –”

“How long do I have.”

(If you interrupt me one more f*cking time) “After you go to –”

“What. Do. I. Need. To. Do. To. Get. Plates. In. This. State.”

She says it like I wasn’t listening to begin with. Like I wasn’t ever trying to help her. Like I wasn’t patient with her the three times she interrupted me.

So slowly I start to list everything she needs again. And she already has everything – it’s just the emissions test that she needs. But here’s the cherry on top: I have this pen. A special pen, as all writers tend to have. One that no one is allowed to touch, because it holds the key to all my creativity and knows my soul.

She reaches accross my counter, onto my desk and grabs it. MY PEN. The bitch grabbed my pen.

That was it. I lost it. First she doesn’t listen, then she has the nerve to grab a pen that isn’t anywhere near her. Just grabs. Doesn’t even ask.

Seething, I grabbed it back.

“You can use this pen.” I hand her the pen on a chain.

“I want to use that pen.”

Authoritatively, “No one uses my pen.”

Again she’s not paying attention to what she needs to pay attention to. She’s writing down something that I’ve already written down for her and she hasn’t listened to me say that ALL SHE NEEDS IS AN EMISSIONS TEST.

“My hands are clean.” She mumbles to herself, half wanting me to hear. So I play along.

“It’s not about clean hands. It’s *my* pen.”

Yeah I had big plans to bitch and whine about it all, but I think now I may have gotten it all out of my system.

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Going postal

Last week a woman from the Post Office calls and sets up an appointment with me for “processing.” She doesn’t go into details, and in fear that I may blow the whole thing, I don’t ask any questions. I am told to arrive at noon at the post office in Queen Anne, and that I will be scheduled to be at the medical unit at 1pm.

And that’s all.

Of course, I have no idea where Queen Anne is. Being that I live in Bellevue, I usually try my best to stay away from Seattle during the week. There’s traffic and pedestrians and cars everywhere (yeah, traffic, I know.) So I leave home nice and early, giving me lots of time to get there and find parking, because you know parking is awful hard to find in big cities. Parking that doesn’t run you completely dry, that is.

So I get there and I’m on time – which we need to establish right now, is a feat on its own – and I nervously drop quarters in the parking meter across the street from the post office. Quarters, because I was all kinds of prepared. See in downtown Honolulu, there are evil parking meters that take ONLY quarters. No sense taking up valuable space with nickles and dimes when you can make people pay for even more time that they don’t need using only quarters. So when I left for Seattle, I was sure to pack enough quarters to park a small fleet.

I make my way up to the 2nd floor, put on my “I really want to be a mailgirl” attitude on, and pull out my good pen. Surely there will be writing.

And there was. There were forms to sign and a questionnaire about my medical history. There was fingerprinting – smashing my fingers on a glass plate hooked up to a computer. All my fingers – not just the thumb like they did when I got my state ID in Hawaii. This was each and every finger. Several times, too, because the machine seems to be very picky. You had to have just the right combination of natural oil, dry finger, and moisturizer.

And then she handed me a map and explained how to get to the medical unit. Of course it was in yet another part of town that I had never been to. Somewhere by Boeing. God only knows where that place is, but thanks to the wonderful green map, I found it. And only five minutes late. Which really wasn’t a bad thing, because the staff nurse was out on lunch, and according to the “will return at . . .” sign, she would be back at 1:15. She won’t even know I was late.

So this medical thing – first there was a drug test. Pee in a cup, bring the cup out, maintain constant eye contact with the pee sample to ensure that no tampering is going on, and wait for five spots to turn blue. If they turn blue, you pass. Of course I had no reason to be worried about the pee test, but it was such torture waiting for those little spots to turn blue! I mean what if something went wrong? What if the testing strip had been contaminated before I even got there?

Anyhow, all was fine with that. Then there was a vision test, a blood pressure test (thank God I have normal bp, despite my size!), and a review of the medical history thing that I filled out.

I passed and return to the personnel place next week for “final processing.” I’m so stoked! My actual starting date is the 15th.

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