Shoes, Drugs & Sexiest Man Alive

I recently had the displeasure of chatting with a Customer Service Drone representing my prescription drug plan. We were haggling over the cost of a particular prescription—why was I paying the non-generic co-pay ($25) for a generic drug ($10)? After he put me on hold and returned with some additional blah, blah, blah, Customer Service Drone noted that if I obtained the drugs via mail rather than from the local pharmacy, I would be charged even less than the generic price, thus saving hundreds of dollars a year that I could then spend on shoes!

Decisions, decisions.

I weighed my options for precisely one-thousandth of a nano-second and had to decline. Because I just received the Dec. 22 issue of Entertainment Weekly. This past Saturday. A full month late. This is a relatively uncommon occurrence, in that issues typically do not arrive at all.

I’m not saying that service out of the Ravenswood Post Office sucks any more than anywhere else in Chicago, where bags of mail, like drunken conventioneers, frequently turn up floating in Lake Michigan. I’m just saying that it sucks more than in whatever utopia Customer Service Drone and his employers call home.

I grew up in the sort of smallish town where the same mailman reliably served our subdivision year after year. We probably knew his name, although we weren’t particularly friendly with him because he had a habit of taking a short cut through the yard to our mailbox, trampling my father’s precious grass. A major faux pas. We knew better and always carved precise right angles from sidewalk to driveway to front door.

My sister still lives in such a place. Why, her mailman is practically part of the family. Or apparently mistook himself as such, which is the only explanation I can give for him asking her, when she was some months pregnant, whether it would be all right for him to put his hand on her stomach. (To which I, the hardened urbanite, would have replied, “What the f***!” but she probably just said, “Oh, now’s not a good time.”)

Clearly I’m looking for a happy medium between too much personal attention and having to wait an entire month for my live-saving drugs or to find out whether Matthew McConaughey is “Sexiest Man Alive? Or Serious Actor?” (I’m going to go out on a limb with “Neither.”)

Other neighbors in my building have raised the issue with our congressional representative, who happens to be Rahm Emmanuel, who I’m sure will look into the matter once he’s finished plotting the complete annihilation of the Republican Party.

As for me, I’m just keeping a tally of all my non-delivered magazines and the cost of replacing them at newsstand price. I plan to present a bill to the Post Office at the end of the year to recoup my losses. That should amount to enough to spring for a pair of shoes—or some non-generic drugs.