Going Postal

For better or worse, these days my go-to source for non-print media is National Public Radio (104.1 on your FM dial in Berlin). I even pay the GEZ license fee so that I can legally listen in on a single-speaker portable in my kitchen when I’m cooking. I say that this is all “for better or worse” because after listening to so much NPR, I’ve realized that while their political bias might lean towards my personal way of thinking, their programs are usually so biased that I end up feeling like I’m not getting the full story. Balanced journalism, NPR is not. But what I find really tough to stomach is that, because they need listeners, they resort to “crisis” reporting just like CNN and the major TV networks. The result is that every embed story from the battlefield in Iraq or Afghanistan starts to sound the same.

On top of that, for the past few years they’ve been desperately trying to attract younger listeners, and their attempts are often transparent and uncomfortable—kind of like if my 70 year-old father suddenly decided to get a lower-back tattoo of a butterfly in order to convince Mom to stop gawking at the muscly boys at her gym. Listening to Terry Gross gush and gush (and gush) over her guests is sometimes embarrassing, especially when she’s interviewing celebs like Will Ferrell or Judd Apatow. And Talk of the Nation’s Neal Conan is so frequently disgusted by the listeners who call in that I can barely listen to him anymore. Don’t get me wrong, I love a lot of NPRs shows. I try to listen to Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me if I’m home on a Saturday evening, and I think that On the Media is terrific. News reader Shay Stevens has maybe the sexiest female voice on the radio, and her counterpart Carl Kasell’s Americana baritone soothes me as he reports about murder, corruption, and other stomach-turning injustices.

Yep, I tune into NPR quite a lot. In fact, maybe I listen too much because the stories I hear make me think that when we’re all finished tearing this world and each other new bungholes, we’ll start inventing things just to ruin them. But then, but then, but then…

Yesterday I went to the post office on Bergmannstrasse to mail a letter to the states. Before I approached the service window I practiced the German for “I would like to send this letter to the USA, please” in my head a couple times. It started off smoothly, and I handed over the letter and a €20 bill. But then, seemingly out of nowhere, the man who was serving me had the temerity to pose a question in such a thick Berliner accent that I began to flounder. Instead of just saying “Wie, bitte,” I did what I usually do and took it too far. First, I scrunched my “I’m sorry” face together and apologized that my German is so poor. Then, I explained that I didn’t understand what he had asked. Turns out, he just wanted to know if I needed a receipt. I said I did, and I stuffed the receipt and my change into my pocket and fled.

Since I now had a €2 coin, I decided to treat myself to a pastry from a bakery in the nearby Market Hall. Just as I finished licking the last remnants of sticky icing from my fingers, I panicked. I had given sir at the post office a twenty, and he’d given me €5 too little. Normally, I’d just call myself an idiot and be done with it, but then my mental calculator started doing its numbers reckoning. “Five Euros equals 8 American bucks!” it reported back to me. “Who throws away eight American bucks?!” So, after a lot of contemplation, I dragged my bony-but-not-entirely-useless ass back into the post office.

The man who had helped me was still in his spot. As I waited to speak with him, his formerly gentle eyes transformed into depraved beady balls of deception. I calmed myself by deciding that under the right circumstances, I could probably kick his ass. Still, when I approached his window I panicked a second time, and apologized again for my terrible German. I explained that he’d somehow shorted me €5, but that it was probably my fault; I decided to take the blame because I thought it would make it clear that I wasn’t looking to do any American-style postal worker ass kicking. I was just hoping to get my money back. He said that he doubted that he’d shorted me, but if he had five extra Euros at the end of the day, he’d give it back to me. He took my phone number, and I left the post office repeatedly karate chopping myself in the nuts as I imagined Sir treating himself to a few of after-work Sternburg beers with his windfall.

By now, the calories from the delicious pastry I’d eaten were spent. I was hungry again so I biked home, went into the kitchen, switched on NPR, and made my luncheon. As usual, a lot bad shit went down in the world yesterday, and by the time I’d finished my beans and rice, I had convinced myself that, well, at least I wasn’t one of the poor girls who had to live through the twisted crap that went down at the polygamist ranch in Texas. Then, I took a nap.

At around six o’clock the phone rang. Obviously, it was sir from the post office. He said he was calling because when he cashed out, he had exactly five Euros too much. He apologized that he wouldn’t be working again until Friday, but that I could pick my money up then. I couldn’t believe it.

I began to wonder if this kind of thing happens all the time. I mean, I’d like to think that I would have done the same thing. I’m pretty sure I would, at least. And I know a few other people who definitely would have given my money back. So if there are a few us mostly-honest people in the world, is it possible that there are a lot more mostly-honest people out there? I think probably there are. In fact, I think that probably this kind of thing happens all the time. But listening to NPR, you’d never know it.