For whatever reason, incompetent postal services are globally tolerated. Seemingly exempt from the same laws that would govern one citizen losing the property of another, we have arrived at a stage where we collectively tolerate an alarming amount of bullshit from those we entrust with our possessions, even if we’ve paid them an awful amount of money. One such way we do so is by setting up entire locations strictly designed to facilitate the delivery process, so that the lazy (and yes, overworked, and underpaid, sure) guys don’t have to even pretend to knock at our doors anymore. 

For those of us living in the city, the onus is often now on us to go and collect our packages from one of these places, a click and collect location, or a point relais, like the one I found myself heading towards one Saturday afternoon a few weeks ago, to collect a package for my girlfriend which had been arbitrarily reassigned from the location of her choice, 5 minutes from her apartment, to one that was now much more inconveniently located, not far enough that we could make an interesting day of it, but certainly not close enough that it wouldn’t be any more than a minor annoyance.

It was one of the first days of this hazy, strange summer, where the sky would shift between pale blues and mid-grey colours that looked as though they were about to crack open and rain 30 degree droplets on us at any given moment. Google marked my destination as a magasin de couture, which I had a hard time translating into something meaningful, but google assures me it’s a tailor. 

The sign above the door must have once been bold, trendy, and lively, but now it’s faded green lettering atop a barely-pink peeling background made it blend into the haze. The behind the glass of the storefront, on the left, were a collection of handmade-looking dresses, the kind you’d see women wearing in Polaroid photos you find stashed in a box in a dusty, second-hand bookstore like the one I found myself in in Philadelphia earlier this year. In the window on the right were three large bird-cages, two of which containing lovely, quiet, colourful little birds, yet nothing else.

I can imagine that, in its heyday, when the sign wasn’t faded and men didn’t need to get on the bus for 20 minutes to collect some mail, that this place had once been a cute, quaint little place, that made a sale or two each day, the rest of it’s value coming from being a thriving member of a trendy street of local businesses. But the 2000s have come and gone, and the 2020s have also arrived, and our post-COVID society has clenched its grip.

A conversion had taken place, a forced upgrade like that of the cybermen, and the possibly-once-cute interior has now been entirely repurposed as a facility for package retrieval. I joined the queue of fellow inverse-mailmen, my eyes quickly moving to the left, to look at the massive bright orange amazon locker, named by the black lettering in the top corner as Maurice or Agnes or something like that, whose sheer shiny orange volume dominated some 20% of the floor space. Smack in the middle of the store was a sturdy yet obviously cheaply assembled shelving unit filled with white packages and brown cardboard boxes, sorted alphabetically by the nom de famille of the recipient, written in bold, accompanied by some kind of coloured sticker system I could not reverse engineer during my short séjour. 

The person at the front of the queue was talking to a lovely and frail looking older lady, clearly an owner, who smiled graciously as she handed the package off, then snapped to the next in line, before quickly zipping away to retrieve the next package, lest the queue get any longer. 

Beyond that great shelving unit were a further three lovely and frail looking older ladies, one of which, the oldest and frailest looking (comments on relatively loveliness withheld), sat in a wheelchair, absent-mindedly holding a black RF unit and slowly scanning packages with the others, as if the three had them had redirected their collective energy into the customer-facing one. They seemed exhausted, behind it all, and the heat of the summer was exerting its presence through the concrete walls and the claustrophobic labyrinth of packages.

Behind the counter, which too was now a place to store packages, was a polaroid photo of the four of them, all at least a decade younger, the lady in the wheelchair taking center stage, all of them smiling, surrounded by dresses on racks, in a store that must have been the one I found myself in, before the packages and amazon lockers, and , perhaps, after the passion.

Before long I was leaving, delivery in hand, quickly making my way to the bus stop before the sky split open, which it did, seconds after I hopped aboard. Did they see it coming? The rain lashed down on the people outside. Was it gradual, or sudden? Did it feel like a decline?

The rain had stopped by the time I got off the bus near my girlfriend’s place. She opened the package, sat her new running shoes down, and we sat on her bed, turned on Amazon Prime to watch an episode of House, which I half watched while I scrolled endlessly on twitter, until the sun started to set.