Why the postal clerk needed a drink on Tuesday night

The tiny town of B has a small post office counter inside a store, standard protocol in small towns. I know all of the clerks, and they're used to me. They don't get so many foreigners in the post office as most expats working at benevolent company J live elsewhere, so anyone in B is usually married to a German or somehow has a modicum of German. That being said, they deal reasonably well with my random oddball requests in bad German, which always require them to look on their magic price lists because they are not so normal for B (a registered letter to the UK, for example.)

I had stacked up a variety of tasks, and unfortunately, the clerk working on Tuesday night is the least experienced postal clerk who gets flustered by the Germans, let alone the non-correctly speaking foreigners. I had the following tasks:

-drop off a dhl paeckchen, already prepaid online
-5 cards to the US, of varying sizes
-1 postcard to the US
-one letter within Germany
-inquire about mail forwarding

to add to the fun, I had gathered all the random little stamps I had left in various increments, so that I could use them up for this mixture of cards.

I started with the pre-paid package, no problem, although I had to point out where it says 'pre-paid'. "You paid this online?"
The 5 cards she needs to weigh and then look up, as two of them fell into the 2,20 range. Then the postcard needed to be looked up. "I'm not so familiar with postcards to USA as no one is usually sending those from here." Then the adding and subtracting of numbers to apply the existing stamps and 'did you bring this one or is it from me?' in the discombobulated stamp applying.
On the mail forwarding, she had never done it, and by then there were 5 people backed up in the line so I said I'd look into that one online. "Good idea."

I don't think she'll miss me once I leave.