This might have been a wonderful day to withdraw from my normal routine and meditate upon the concerns that are important to me, but it also happened to be the day I needed to get a rewrite of a play off to a theater in England from a small town in New Mexico by next Tuesday - 7/31. I had of course known about the deadline for eleven months - since I missed it by a month last year - but while I piddled around a little bit with it over the winter for some strange reason I was unable to concentrate on it, and only began to focus in round about last Sunday.
Four days sitting behind a computer and finally on Thursday morning (with Jupiter coming ever closer to conjunct Uranus) I was ready to print a clean copy and take myself off to the post office.
Twenty or so pages into it, I get a message my color cartridge has run out and the printer won't work without it, so off I go to Walmart, only five miles away, and buy both a black and color cartridge to be safe.
Back home and try and take a 400-word synopsis down to 200, search out a bio, try to understand the submission requirements (use a pseudonym, staple this to that, put this in a sealed envelope along with an International Reply Coupon (IRC) if you're not mailing from the UK, address the envelope to your pseudonym (!) etc. etc. etc. Round about two o'clock, off I go to the post office, only four miles away.
After being next in line for ten minutes while the man behind the counter has an extended chat with his current customer about his difficulties in losing weight, it's my turn, and up to the counter I go to ask for my IRC, whereupon I'm told a) I'm the first person ever to have asked for one and b) they are no longer sold. I make one attempt at suggesting he contact the nearest big town two hours away and ask if they have any there, but no, he's adamant, *they* don't make them any more and there's no point in his asking.
I ask for a piece of paper, scribble a note to the effect that I will send postage under separate cover at a later date, stick it in the big envelope and get back in line. When it's my turn again, I ask which service I need to get the envelope to England in five days time and am told the first delivery date I can be guaranteed is next Friday, August third.
This being of not much help, I say thank you and take myself off to the UPS depot, but as it's not yet 3:00 pm, their opening time, that doesn't do me any good either. I've promised myself some Albertson's fried chicken as my reward for getting the play off in time (hey - life is what you make it) , so decide to go there first, get the chicken and THEN go back to UPS to send the script off.
There's a UPS store in the strip mall with the Albertson's, so for the hell of it I go in there and ask if they can get the document to England by Tuesday. They can, and it will only cost me $81, but they won't accept the package without a phone number for the theater. I tell them I don't have a phone number and have no way of getting one, so go and buy my fried chicken and go back to the real UPS to see if they'll take the envelope without the phone number.
I punch in all the info at the UPS computer, tell it when I want the package delivered by noon on Monday, and discover if I don't have the recipient phone number I can use mine (?), so I do. The UPS man is already a bit baffled at the mention of a foreign country, but gamely takes my printout, does whatever he does with it, and tells me his computer says he can't do that. I tell him the UPS store says they can, so he tells me to do another printout changing the time I want it delivered, so I make it end-of-day Monday. Again he tells me there's no way his computer is telling him the package will arrive by then, so I have another go and put in end-of-day Tuesday.
I put my finger on the "print" button and push, and - and I swear I am not making this up - the air conditioner stops, the lights go out, the computer screen goes blank and the whole depot loses power. This is what is known as living in the country.
I'm now approaching the time both places have told me I need to have the envelope in by - the real UPS driver goes and picks up at the UPS Store and takes everything to the one flight a day out of the local airport - so off I go again, my fried chicken getting soggier and soggier in its waxed bag, back to the UPS Store where the manager says he never told me they wouldn't take the envelope with a recipient phone number, he just said it would probably delay things as customs calls ahead to notify the recipient they have a *foreign* document on the way.
Fortunately, I am on medication, so simply say "Oh," and seeing an "Ask For Your Triple A Discount" sign on the desk, ask for my Triple A discount, which I how I finally handed over my script to perhaps be delivered by the deadline for the cost of only $78.
When I can summon up the courage, I'm going to track the package, but it's only been in transit for 23 hours so far and I think I'll give it the full two days before I look. I'm not on that much medication.
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