My Night

Oh my god, what a night I had. To start with, when I was in Vienna last October, I saw signs all over town for a musical production of Rebecca. I really wanted to see it, but we were only there for one night and I had already purchased very expensive tickets to see the ballet Giselle at the opera house. I was browsing on footlight.com last December and saw that they had the cast recording of Rebecca. I wanted to get it but had just spent a buttload of money on Christmas presents, so I waited until mid-January when my credit card rolled over. I then went to order it, and it was no longer on their site. Amazon and Barnes & Noble never had it, even when it was still on footlight, and it wasn't on half.com or ebay. I finally found a German website, musical-shop.de that had it. However, only the product description page was in English. All of the ordering and shipping information pages were in German. The price seemed about comparable to what footlight had been charging, so I went ahead and took a leap of faith and ordered it. I got an immediate email confirmation and then didn't hear anything until the beginning of March when I finally got an email stating that it had been shipped. Well, yesterday, I got home around 6:00 and found a package notification slip in my mailbox, informing me that I had a package and it would be redelivered today. Well, I am never home when the mail carrier gets there, even on Saturdays which when I see clients at my private therapy practice. The slip said the post office (the Lakeview Station Post Office, by far the worst in the city and the most notorious for fucking up mail delivery) closed at 7:00, so I decided to run and pick it up. Now, this ended up presenting several problems. First, the illiterate mail carrier, who apparently thinks that the last names Johnson, Conner, and Mishrakawabithiam (the other residents in my building) all look exactly like Harms since I get mail for all of them in my box all the time as well as mail for other buildings on the block, wrote down my last name as Herms on the slip. Then, I drove to the post office, only to find that there were no spots on the two main streets bordering the building. I had to park on the side street which is permit parking only after 6:00, which only reinforces my belief that the sole purpose of permit parking is to raise money for the city. Why would they start the permit clock an hour before the only business on that block closes, especially since that's the hour that people are going to be coming to the post office after they get home and find these pacakge delivery slips. It's obviously rigged to generate as much parking ticket revenue as possible. So, with another leap of faith, I parked on that street, put my blinkers on, and ran into the post office. I was the first one in line, behind the two that were currently being helped by the two people still working the counter. These two postal employees were the slowest people I have ever seen in my life. Do they get kickbacks from the police for keeping people who park on that side street in the building long enough for the police to ticket their cars? It took 10 minutes for one person to finish and I could go up. Of course, I'm stressing the whole time about my car. So, I give the slip to the guy and show him my driver's license. Now, this led to the next problem. For certain financial reasons, I keep the address on my license as my parent's address, where I spent the first 18 years of my life in the suburbs. This has never been a problem picking up a package before. I just say that I just moved, they see that the name is the same, and give me my package. Well, this guy looks at the license and says, "That's not your name, this package is for Herms." Oh my lord, the only reason I didn't blow a gasket then and there is because I wanted to get the package as quickly as possible and get back to my car before it got ticketed. I said, obviously the mail carrier made a typo, it's a one letter difference, and he agreed to go find the package, but he would only give it to me if the name on the package matched my name on my license. I said fine, figuring we'd deal with that when we got there. The man then sauntered (yes, sauntered) down the length of the counter to the door to the back and went through it. Several minutes later, he came back out, opened a cabinet by the door, fiddled through it for a while, closed it and went back through the door, came back about 5 minutes later still empty handed, opened the cabinet again, fiddled through it some more, finally pulled out a package, looked at it, looked at the slip, looked at the package again, closed up the cabinet, and sauntered back to his station at the counter. My blood pressure was through the roof at this point, if my car had a ticket on it, I'd be going postal myself and taking down every major governmental agency in the city. He looked at it, held it out of my sight, and said "that's not your name on the label." I responded that I could tell him it was from musical-shop.de and I could even tell him what was in there if he wanted to open it up. He said "that still doesn't mean it's for you" and my reply was "Come on, how many Vienesse cast albums that are bordering on being out of print are going to come to two people in this neighborhood with such similar names, obviously it's for me." He looked at it again and said "Well, it's close enough" and almost handed it to me, then snatched it back and said, "I almost forgot, I have to record that I gave this out," and sauntered again back to the cabinet where he found the package and spent almost another 5 minutes writing down some sort of information before finally sauntering back, almost handed it to me and then snatched it away again, and said, "just have to scan it," scanned the label, and finally gave it to me. Then, the kicker was, the label did have my correct name on it, Harms, but the label was filled out:

Herr
Greg Harms
then my address information, which as much as I love all of you, I'm not copying here.

The fucking dyslexic postal carrier obviously mangled Herr and Harms together when filling out the package slip, and the fucking moronic counter worker who probably couldn't even find Germany on a map thought Herr was part of my name. I grabbed the package, took off running, and fortunately, when I got back to my car, there was no ticket. It had taken almost 25 fucking minutes to pick up a package when I was the first person in line, and they want to raise their rates? I headed back home, put the CD in the computer to copy it onto my mp3 player (a Cowan iAudio X5L, I highly recommend it over an ipod), and the CDDB couldn't find any information on it. I had to type in all the track listing information, but since the titles are all in German and most of the performers have weird German names like Wietske, it took a little longer for me to type it in and double check that everything was spelled correctly. I finished, started the copying, and finally got to Patti LuPone on Ugly Betty. It had started about 10 minutes earlier, but thanks to Tivo, I was able to start watching from the beginning and catch up. Then, about half an hour later (at the 7:30 mark on the show, it was about 7:40 in real time), the motherfucking goddam cable went out!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! My rabbit ears are locked up somewhere in the building's storage room, but even if I had had them, I was still about 10 minutes behind the actual broadcast. I grabbed the phone and called Comcast and after punching in all my information, got a recorded message saying they were aware of the outage and estimated that it would be fixed by 9:44 pm, and they were sorry for any inconvenience. The cable going out in the middle of Patti LuPone on Ugly Betty isn't an inconvenience, it's a fucking outrage! She's had a difficult enough year, losing the Tony to fucking LaChanze, and now they take this away from her? The only reason I have not called the FCC and begun proceedings to revoke Comcast's broadcasting license is because ABC makes their shows available online after they air, and I can watch the episode during lunch. I can't believe the fucking incompetence in this city sometimes. City that works, my ass. It's nights like this that make me so ready to leave this city once and for all. However, I've been listening to Rebecca as I've been sitting here writing this, and the CD makes all the hassle at the Post Office worthwhile. Leave it to musical theatre to fix what the city fucks up.