Hunt the parcel
Our postal arrangements aren’t exactly going postal – they have become rather strange though.
Our old postman was a grand lad. He’d motor up around half past one: Penny would lash out to greet him and he’d give her a little treat. The odd time there would be a parcel so he’d bang on the door and deliver my parcel [and treat – the dog lost out with parcels] and we’d have a cheery chat.
For the last couple of months or so, everything has changed. The first sign was when Penny started woofing quietly on the foot of my bed at eight in the morning. She obviously didn’t want to wake me as the woof was always quiet, yet she had to wake me as any good guard dog would. Sure enough – on the “woof” mornings there would be a letter or two lying in the porch. A postal delivery at eight in the morning? It had to be a new postman.
Now if Old Postman had a parcel to deliver and I wasn’t in, he’d leave it in the window box beside the front door. This was great as I could see it from inside and collect it.
New postman has an entirely different attitude to parcels. I don’t think he likes them.
The first time I discovered this change in routine was one day when I went around the side of the house to the front, and there was a parcel leaning against the wall under the bedroom window. Fair enough. Maybe it had fallen out of the window box.
A few days later I again had necessity to visit the front garden and there was another parcel but this one was just propped against the gate on the inside. I assumed he must have been in a hurry though it was quite clever of him to lean it against the inside of the gate and then open the gate to get out without knocking the parcel over. I don’t know how long it had been there.
A few days ago I had to go out in the afternoon. I got my act together, the dog harnessed and all that stuff and went out to the car. There was a parcel sitting on the bonnet [okay – “hood” you ignorant Mercans]. Again, I had no idea how long it had been there.
Yesterday I had to collect a load of stuff from the village so I went to start the car. The battery [as usual] was flat so I went to the front to jump start it with my defibrillator. It’s lucky I did because there was another parcel, but this one was tucked underneath the engine and was barely visible.
It has reached the stage where I have to go on a treasure hunt around the front garden every day, just in case. Herself keeps ordering shit on the Interwebs so I never know when a parcel is due. Usually she forgets that she has ordered stuff to so each new parcel is a surprise for both of us.
So far he has kept things to ground level [with the exception of the one on the bonnet of the car].
God help me if he starts flinging them up into the trees.
You think you’ve got problems with parcels? I don’t even have an address here. I have to tell everyone who I order from to put my mobile number on the address label so the delivery company can call me to say I have a parcel, or it just gets returned to sender. I also never know if it will come to the Post Office or to one of the couriers. I’ve had bank cards and driving licences returned to sender because I didn’t know they’d arrived in time. I’ve even had stuff returned to sender when I’ve been away and called the courier to say I’ll be back in a few days to collect, and they’ve sent it back anyway because it’s DHL policy! Cunts! I’ve cultivated my postman, who now has my number in his phone, so that’s sorted, and the main courier has my number in their computer database, so that’s sorted, but the other courier isn’t up to speed yet.
No matter, I’m at my new place soon, where I actually have an address, so all that malakeas (literal translation – wankery) will be in the past. I hope!
Whenever ordering something I always tell ’em to put my number on the parcel as nine times out of ten they get lost. On a couple of occasions they have passed my place several times before refusing to try again, at which point I have to drive to them [usually half way up the mountain].
Just to make like a lot easier, a family moved in up the road. Same surname, same first initial and just to confuse things further, they gave their house a name almost identical to mine – a sort of Hard Rumbles Manor type of name.
With Herself and her fondness for online shopping though most of the courier companies know us quite well by now. I’m on first name terms with one or two.
I wonder if there is some kind of etymological connection between “malakeas” and “malarkey”?
I wonder if there is some kind of etymological connection between “malakeas” and “malarkey”?
I just Googled ‘malarkey, word origin’, and interestingly came up with: Malarkey might even be from modern Greek: “μαλακός (malakos) soft, or its derivative μαλακία (malakia).”
http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2012/10/12/162791655/whats-all-this-malarkey-about-malarkey
See also: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1500337?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
Now μαλακός does indeed mean ‘soft’, but in the vernacular, μαλάκας (note the shift of the accent also) means ‘wanker’, and is in common usage. In fact, it is without doubt the most common vulgarity used in Greek, and is used by all and sundry on a regular basis.
It’s quite possible that these learned etymologists, looking through their Greek dictionaries, were quite unaware of the popular slang used by Greeks, and so confused the ‘soft / wanker’ connection.
Language really is a quite fascinating subject.
Or the learned etymologists knew exactly what they were doing and decided to take the piss knowing that most of us (with the exception of this esteemed blog’s author and contributors) wouldn’t think of looking it up!
Does the postie play music while he’s doing the deliveries? I was thinking maybe he does and when the music stops he has to get rid of a parcel as quickly as possible in the most original place?
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