Oh Italy...

Just now I was telling Leah how I went to the post office, but couldn't figure out how to buy stamps. She told me to google it and I found this (it may be horrible writing but it is incredibly accurate). I don't know if it will be funny to you, but this is exactly how Italy operates and is the exact scene I witnessed today in the post office.


"If you just want a few stamps it'll probably be easier for you to just buy them at a 'tabaccheria' and then drop your postcards in the nearest postbox; because of the incredible popularity of cell phones in Italy, there's not much actual posting goes on at the Italian post office anymore. Then again, it's so inefficient, we doubt if there ever was.

Go into any post office in Rome and you will encounter two or three incredibly long queues - All the people in these queues are queuing for the same thing - Not postage stamps, but in fact something called the Conto Corrente. The Conto Corrente is the Italian version of the Giro credit, and it is how most bills are paid in Italy. One delightful feature of the Conto Corrente payment slip is that it's about ten minutes work to fill one in. You then queue for about forty minutes to pay it, as there's only ever two or three clerk's windows open, and the clerks operate at a ridiculously slow pace.

A recent sophistication of our local post office is a client-number waiting system - You know, same as they have at busy delicatessens these days - You go in, pull a numbered ticket out of a machine on the wall and wait until your number is displayed above the teller's window. This sounds like a good idea, but in practice the service is even slower than before - All it does is accomplish the devious psychological feat of making the customers feel as if they're gonna be attended to soon - In fact all it does is take the immediate pressure off the clerks, so that they now operate at an even slower pace, with no motivation to speed up. Typical Italian solution. Eventually this service will fail, not because anyone will complain about it, but because one day the numbering machine will break down and no one will ever make the effort to come out and fix it - So they'll go back to the old system of long, slow, angry queues while forty-thousand dollars of taxpayer's money tied up in the failed numbering hardware will sit rotting in a dusty corner of the post office.

If you do attempt to buy postage stamps in the post office, you'd better buy plenty while you're there. That's if you ever figure out which queue to get in - I never do because nothing's ever sign-posted properly. We don't advise you to post anything of value in Italy actually - it's unlikely to reach its destination intact, if at all, even inland, let alone international post."