nothing is working
quick runner to the post office as society collapses
You’re riding bitch in a fifteen-person queue at the back of W.H. Smith’s—excessively swiping down on the ‘No Internet Connection error’ Google Chrome browser. It snaps back elastically. No change. The T-Rex hops twice. The 4G Network pendulum swings between 2 and 3 bars.1
It’s twenty one days before Christmas. There’s only one person working in the Post Office.
Nobody in the queue wants to use the self-checkouts. Everyone knows the on-screen process is imbued with booby-traps that’ll drain your wallet and swallow your parcel into an untraceable void if you do so much as press the right button in the wrong way.
You wait patiently on the caveman’s conveyor belt to be served by Susan, whose face screws in a manner only someone who’s overworked, underpaid and totally over it can contort.
The Kettle crisps you picked up at the corner shop become irresistible, partly from hunger but mostly because you need something to do if your smart-phone is going to withhold the internet and cosplay as a glorified tin-can-and-string. Fifth in the queue. You try to pry open the foil bag gently—so as to not disrupt The Great British Lull™—and the souls of all crisps that could’ve fit in the empty space wheeze out. You decide to count how many are in the bag (as if you know how many should be). No answer would’ve satisfied you but sixteen feels low.2
Till number… Two, please.
Your mind wanders to the train ticket you bought yesterday. The transaction didn’t work on the machine so you went to the kiosk and spoke to a fella with the polar opposite demeanour of Susan. He gave a chirpy warning. Prices are going up next week, chap. Better get you tix in!3 You sigh. They’re bloomin’ bleeding us dry. The words spun from your mouth with enough irreverence that the gravity of them dispersed into an ambient British mist. He handed you the ticket with bouncy cackle. Ain’t they just? You headed to the platform, where the shiny new LED screen informed you the train was going to be ten minutes late.
Till number… Two, please.
You shuffle forward. A man behind you makes a thespian tut before peeling off to the self checkouts. Good luck with that, mate blinks in your mind. Crisps crunch then slurry in your mouth and it reminds you of the restaurant in Chelsea with the potato terrine and roasted quail. They added a complimentary service charge to the bill that you were too embarrassed to get removed. Your date grabbed the bill after you’d paid and blurted out TWENTY PERCENT? with the exact same force and cadence of surprise that had blared in your own thoughts not moments before. When you responded yeah, they’re trying to be America so bad, she became more animated, launching into a tirade about how the Tories used the veil of austerity to underfund the NHS for decades to force the British medical service to rely on insurance-based systems. The pain that has become a ubiquitous reality in your lower back pulses at the abbreviation ‘NHS’ in memory of the many fiery hoops you’ve had to jump through to get it treated. She continued: All the gammons ragging on immigrants are going to be in for a big shock when their last two, racist brain cells give up the ghost and they have to whip out their Natwest card in the ambulance. You found yourself surrendering to an intrusive thought: Am I sexually attracted to witty political rants?
Till number… Two, please.
In just over three weeks time, you’re going to be descending the stairs of your family home while reading an article about energy company’s profits4 . Your father will be perched on the couch watching the news and Fiona Bruce will be reporting on the cost of living crisis, sympathising with the energy companies that have been hit with devastating force by Putin’s dastardly war in Ukraine. Her delivery of the news will have a level of top-spin that’d make Roger Federer tilt his head in admiration.
Till number… Two, please.
It’s your turn. You step to Susan’s till and ask to post two letters to America—New York and Texas. She warns you they might not arrive before Christmas. You ask how much it’d be to insure they do. The price she utters knocks the wind out your lungs with a hiss. The man who huffed and puffed himself out of the queue is now unleashing his breathy frustrations on the bright red post office machines, reeling off every variation for “oh, for goodness sake!” his mental bank of British idioms can withdraw.
You can’t help but see the self checkouts as a perfect allegory for the sorry societal state—needlessly complicated systems packaged as convenient to give the illusion of granted autonomy but functionally unusable unless you have some sort of arch, insider, specialist knowledge of them.
Susan asks if you want to spend the elevenfold expense on tracking. You politely decline and pay for the regular extortionate pricing. You tell Susan she’s doing great and you’re happy you got speak to someone as patient as her today. She says You caught me on a bad day, mind you. You respond, You’re this delightful on a bad day? I need to come back on a good day! She laughs for the first time since you joined the line.
It’s not until February that your friend in New York sends you selfie holding your Christmas card. Your friend who was in Texas for Christmas doesn’t seem to get it at all. 50% success rate on the postal service—a network that used to be responsible for the majority of the world’s written communication. You wonder if anyone else feels like they’re trapped in the inescapable machinations of a slow-motion car crash. You wonder if you’re just being extra—looking at these minor, first-world inconveniences and adding them up in the melodramatic manner that only an artist would. You wonder if you deserve the collapse you are witnessing and whether, in the grand scheme of things, you are feeling intensely about something that is actually fine or normal or, at least, natural. Maybe you aren’t swimming in a uniquely broken time of human existence but simply feeling the friction of what it is to live. Then you consider how few bugs there are now5 or the fact that you haven’t seen a hedgehog in nearly ten years6. Or how you walk through the town centre of your hometown, the shop-fronts that used to be populated and vibrant are all boarded up and vacant7. Or that the world is literally losing colour8. As the wedded companion of life, death is omnipresent—all around us, all the time. What you see is not death in the natural sense—a physical event that atomises one’s consciousness back into the bisque of the universe. What you see is: Zombies. Fossils. Statues. Snags. Abandoned Machinery. Things suspended in states of agonising unrest. And you wonder what it will take to make them work.
Since Huawei was banned for “national security reasons” — Britain has had the worst network service in Europe.
When I started this piece in December, British rail prices were already the highest in Europe. As of March 2th, the ticket prices in England have once again been increased, this time by 4.6%.
there is no better way to describe this than as a "work of art". absolutely phenomenal. title hit the spot too lol
This is funny, wounded, rhythmically tight. A slow-motion scream from the post office queue as empire frays. im all here 4 it. let her rip