Posting Good Cheer : Littlerock : * ZIP: 93543 : * Number of people in line upon arrival: 0 : * Number of people in line upon departure: 0

The way it worked out just wasn’t fair.

I had been handed a golden opportunity to zing the Postal Service. Just show up at a post office on the Saturday before Christmas weekend, one of the busiest mail days short of April 15, and write about the chaos.

Cruise the parking lot a dozen times to find a space. Wait an hour in line to mail a small parcel. Interview some weary, impatient customers, weighted down with bulky holiday packages.

As assignments go, this would be as tough as sawing a toothpick in two.

And it would be pay-back time: for all those endless lines I’ve endured to get a brief audience with the lone postal clerk on duty; for all of those empty coin-changers, sitting beside out-of-order stamp machines; for that time the Postal Service failed to forward my mail to a new address.

For this day’s expose, I was directed to a small rural post office in Littlerock, a dusty desert town of 9,000, about 10 miles east of Palmdale. No problem. Post offices, like McDonald’s, are just about the same everywhere, right?

But the first sign of trouble appeared when I turned off Pearblossom Highway and pulled up to the small nondescript building: three vacant parking spaces loomed ahead. Don’t the people of Littlerock celebrate Christmas?

Fresh horrors awaited me inside. I scanned the outer lobby for that inevitable broken stamp machine. It not only was not broken, it was not there. Only humans sell stamps at this post office.

Finally, the moment of reckoning, that torturous wait for service. Except, as I entered the inner lobby at 10 a.m., I found . . . no line. No line at all. Just two clerks, each busy with one customer. A miniature Christmas tree adorned with colored ornaments and a roll of Lifesavers rested on the counter between them.

At 10:01, one window was free. I stepped up and handed over my parcel. “$2.59, how about that?” the clerk said cheerily, and I was on my way.

I stuck around for another 40 minutes just to make sure it wasn’t a fluke. Sure enough, one of the clerks soon closed her window, and the line grew scandalously long: oh, maybe five or six people.

Next week, I hear they’re looking for writers to do a hit piece about the phone company.

I think I’ll pass.

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