My post office lady hates me.

Just my luck. I live outside of a small town, and there are only two postal workers in the post office that I deal with. One is a great guy: retired Navy, now goes to my church, an avid bicyclist who sold me my bike and he's a novice gun guy. (I'm helping him find a good first pistol currently).

The other one in there is a recent transfer in from some other postal facility. I've yet to find a way onto her good side, and after yesterday I'm beginning to suspect that she doesn't have one.

It all began when I walked in with a nondescript large rectangular box to send out. My mail buddy, I guy I'll call "Newman" (because it irks him when I do it in person, which is funny to me) is out to lunch. She takes my box, weighs it, and asks me the standard question: "Anything liquid, fragile, perishable or hazardous?"

I truthfully say no and she quotes the overnight mail price, which I pay after gasping audibly. After she takes the box and gives me my receipt and tracking paper, Newman walks in. I call out to him in my best Seinfeld voice: "Hello, Newman!" He glowers but comes over to shoot the breeze.

"You got here just a second too late," I tell him. "If you'd come before I sealed that box up, I'd have shown you my M60."

"Your machine gun?" he asks "Damn, I would have liked to have seen that."

"Is THAT what was in that box?" yells the Mean Old Mail Lady as she's coming back around to the front after putting my box on the outgoing mail rack. "You can't ship machine guns through the mail!"

"Can and did," I replied. "It's perfectly legal to mail machine guns. What I can't mail is handguns, and that wasn't a handgun. And it's not like this is the first time I've shipped or received one here"

"I specifically asked you if there was anything hazardous in that box!"

"And I said that these wasn't," I replied. "It's not hazardous in the least unless you drop it on your foot."

"But it's a MACHINE GUN!" she exclaimed, as if that all by itself made it hazardous.

"And that's not an issue," I said. "There's no ammunition in the box. Your only concern is to get it where it's going. The federal government knows that I have that and they don't have a problem with it."

"But how about the person that it's going to? Do they have ammunition for it?"

"Well I should hope so. It's going to a legitimate repair facility for such things, and the government knows all about them, too. All you need to do is make sure that it gets there."

She offered up a few more objections, and she flipped through a big book of postal regulations, probably trying to find some way to refuse to accept the package, but in the end she finally let it go and I got the call this morning confirming it's arrival in Nevada. But I have a hunch that I'm not going to be any too popular in that post office for a while, and I should probably refrain from mailing anything that's even slightly breakable.

Oh well.