DownWithTyranny!: Benchley Tonight: "Back in Line"

Last night, accompanying the ground-breaking "Little Sermon on Success," we saw the Benchley short film "The Treasurer's Report." Tonight we have another of those deliciously off-kilter shorts, complete with Spanish subtitles! (Is there a Cult of Benchley somewhere in the Spanish-speaking world?) With regard to one of the subjects that comes up herein, note that there's a wonderful Benchley piece called "Ask That Man"; maybe we can get it into the Benchley Tonight rotation.

"Most of this line-standing is the fault of the Government, just as everything else which is bad in our national life is the fault of the Government, including stone bruises and tight shoes."

--Robert Benchley, in "Back in Line"

Back in Line

For a nation which has an almost evil reputation for bustle, bustle, bustle, and rush, rush, rush, we spend an enormous amount of time standing around in line in front of windows, just waiting. It would be all right if we were Spanish peasants and could strum guitars and hum, or even stab each other, while we were standing in line, or East Indians who could just sit cross-legged and simply stare into space for hours. Nobody expects anything more of Spanish peasants or East Indians, because they have been smart enough to build themselves a reputation for picturesque lethargy.

But we in America have built ourselves reputations for speed and dash, and are known far and wide as the rushingest nation in the world. So when fifty of us get in a line and stand for an hour shifting from one foot to the other, rereading the shipping news and cooking recipes in an old newspaper until our turn comes, we just make ourselves look silly.

Most of this line-standing is the fault of the Government, just as everything else which is bad in our national life is the fault of the Government, including stone bruises and tight shoes. We would have plenty of time to rush around as we are supposed to do, if the Government did not require 500 of us to stand in one line at once waiting for two civil service employees to weigh our letters, thumb out income-tax blanks, tear off our customs slips or roll back our eyelids. Of course, there are times when we stand in line to see a ball game or buy a railroad ticket, but that is our affair, and in time we get enough sense to stop going to ball games or traveling on railroads.

The U.S. Post Office is one of the most popular line-standing fields in the country. It has been estimated that six-tenths of the population of the United States spend their entire lives standing in line in a post office. When you realize that no provision is made for their eating or sleeping or intellectual advancement while they are thus standing in line, you will understand why six-tenths of the population look so cross and peaked. The wonder is that they have the courage to go on living at all.

The wonder is that they have the courage to go on living at all.

This congestion in the post offices is due to what are technically known as "regulations" but what are really a series of acrostics and anagrams devised by some officials who got around a table one night and tried to be funny. "Here's a good gag!" one of them probably cried. "Let's make it so that as soon as a customer reaches the window with his package after his forty-five minutes in line, he has to go home again, touch some object made of wood, turn around three times, and then come back and stand in line again!" "No, no, that's too easy!" another objected. "Let's make it compulsory for the package to be wrapped in paper which is watermarked with Napoleon's coat of arms. We won't say anything about it until they get right up to the window, so there will be no danger of their bringing that kind of paper with them. Then they will have to go away again with their bundles, find some paper watermarked with Napoleon's coat of arms (of which there is none that I ever heard of), rewrap their bundles, and come back and stand in line again. What do you say to that!" This scheme probably threw the little group of officials into such a gale of merriment that they had to call the meeting off and send down for some more White Rock.

You can't tell me that the post-office regulations (to say nothing of those of the Custom House and Income Tax Bureau) were made 'with anything else in mind except general confusion. It must be a source of great chagrin to those in charge to think of so many people being able to stick a stamp on a letter and drop it into a mail box without any trouble or suffering at all. They are probably working on that problem at this very minute, trying to devise some way in which the public can be made to fill out a blank, stand in line, consult some underling who will refer them to a superior, and then be made to black up with burned cork before they can mail a letter. And they'll figure it out, too. They always have.

But at present their chief source of amusement is in torturing those unfortunates who find themselves with a package to send by mail. And with Christmas in the offing, they must be licking their chops with glee in very anticipation. Although bundles of old unpaid bills is about all anyone will bd sending this Christmas, it doesn't make any difference to the P.O. Department. A package is a package, and you must suffer for it.

It wouldn't be a bad idea for those of us who have been through the fire to get together and cheat the officials out of their fun this year by sending out lists of instructions (based on our own experience) to all our friends, telling them just what they have got to look out for before they start to stand in line. Can you imagine the expression on the face of a post-office clerk if a whole line of people came up to his window, one by one, each with his package so correctly done up that there was no fault to find with it? He would probably shoot himself in the end, rather than face his superiors with the confession that he had sent no one home to do the whole thing over. And if his superiors shot themselves too it would not detract one whit from the joyousness of the Christmas tide.

So here are the things I have learned in my various visits to the Post Office. If you will send me yours and get ten friends to make a round robin of their experiences, we may thwart the old Government yet.

Packages to be mailed abroad must be:

1. Wrapped in small separate packages, each weighing no more than one pound and seven-eighths (Eastern Standard Time), and each package to be tied with blue ribbon in a sheepshank knot. (Any sailor of fifteen years' experience will teach you to tie a sheepshank.)

2. The address must be picked out in blue, and re-enforced with an insertion of blue ribbon, no narrower than three-eighths of an inch and no wider than five-eighths of an inch, (and certainly not exactly four-eighths or one-half), or else you may have to stay and write it out a hundred times after the post office has closed.

3. The package, no matter what size, will have to be made smaller.

4. The package, no matter what size, will have to be made larger.

(In order to thwart the clerk on these last two points, it will be necessary to have packages of all sizes concealed in a bag slung over your back.)

5. The person who is mailing the package must approach the window with the package held in his right hand extended toward the clerk one foot from the body, while with the left hand he must carry a small bunch of lilies of the valley, with a tag on them reading: "Love from -- [name of sender] -- to the U.S. Post Office."

6. The following ritual will then be adhered to, a deviation by a single word subjecting the sender to a year in Leavenworth or both:

Clerk's Question: Do you want to mail a package?
Sender's Answer: No, sir.
Q. What do you want to do ?
A. I don't much care, so long as I can be with you.
Q. Do you like tick-tack-toe?
A. I'm crazy mad for it.
Q. Very well. We won't play that.
A. Aren't you being just a little bit petty?
Q. Are you criticizing me?
A. Sorry.
Q. And high time. Now what do you want?
A. ToUy dear.
Q. You get along with yourself. What's in your hand?
A. Flowers for you -- dear.
Q. I know that. What's in the other hand?
A. I won't tell.
Q. Give it here this minute.
A. You won't like it.
Q. Give-it-here-this-minute, I say.
The sender reluctantly gives over the parcel.
Q. What do you want to do with this?
A. I want to take it home with me and wrap it up again.
Q. You leave it here, and like it.
A. Please give it back. Please, pretty please?
Q. I will do no such thing. You leave it here and I will mail it for you. And shut up!

The sender leaves the window, sobbing. The clerk, just to be mean, mails the package.