enough

i went to the post office today to pay my phone and cable bills. and to buy some stamps. i've been sending cards to the states and i think it's nicer to have a stamp on each one than a big post office printed thing. it's similar to how they do it in the US. so, since i was thinking about it, i decided to buy 15 stamps for the cards i have sitting at home waiting to be written.

i haven't bought stamps in a while so i asked the woman how much was a stamp for a letter to the US. 18kc. great. i'll take 15. she gave me a look and said, ok, let me take care of your bills first. no problem.

after the bills are done she takes down the big book of stamps every teller has. it's not like in the states where they have them in books of 20 or rolls of 100. nope. each teller has this big (bigger than legal size--it's like a coffee-table book) book of heavy paper with stamps of varying denominations paper-clipped to the pages. this is true in every post office i've ever been in here.

at the main post office there's a special window just for stamps where you can buy all kinds of all denominations. again, more common to buy one or two or four than 100. at my post office, you have to go through a special door to do anything in bulk. but i only wanted 15. that's not bulk. right?

so the teller finds the 18kc stamps. and she says something about how 15 is quite a lot and did i really need that many. before i knew what we were working with, i said, well, maybe 10. she kind of screwed up her face in dislike. but then she found the right stamps. and it didn't look like too many...until she unfolded the second page and lo, there were more than 40! she asked again, how many? and i said, well, 15. you've got plenty. again with the discomfort on her face. as if i was taking something precious from her. reluctantly she tore off half the page and returned the other 20 or so to their clip in the book.

what happened there? are tellers specifically instructed to sell as few stamps as possible? keep as many in the book as you can. we'll be grading you on how few you sell and how many you retain. this is all you get for the month. if you run out, you'll be humiliated into asking other tellers to dig into their own books to help you out, and you don't want to do that. because there's not enough.

i think that's key. not enough. i think that's a basic principle in this country. for many decades there really was never enough, and now that there is, no one knows how to deal with it. my local grocery store regularly runs out of milk and sugar and eggs. if i run over on a sunday evening, i can't be sure i'll find milk. no kidding. somehow they haven't gotten the hang of ordering the right amount. that, or they just don't bother to put it out.

but there is enough. there are certainly enough stamps. there is certainly enough milk. but someone wants people to believe there isn't. i don't know what it is. keep the people frustrated? don't bother running a store or post office well? don't try to serve the people? fight them at every turn when they want something you think they shouldn't have?

it's not uncommon here to be scorned by a waiter, shop assistant, post office teller. why? we need each other to conduct our business. they have something i want. i have something they want. why are they so mad at me?

getting back to enough. i read an article about the idea of enough a while back. i wish i remember where. but it talked about the idea that, if we all realized there was enough of what we need or want in this world, we wouldn't be in such a hurry to trample other people to try to get it faster. complicated to try to tell this to people starving in africa or without medicine in asia, i know. but, for us westerners who really do have enough. why do we always think we don't?