The life of the table hoggers

            The United States Post Office has to be one of the busiest places in town, especially on a Saturday morning. I found myself there this past weekend mailing two large boxes to my son in Taiwan.

            I didn't realize cologne was a hazardous waste – although Old Spice might qualify – so I had to open both boxes because I couldn't remember which box had the bottle. Then I had to stuff everything back in the box, buy a roll of tape from the Post Office kiosk to reseal the boxes and fill out complicated mailing forms.

            Printing my name in the tiny boxes took most of my concentration, but after a couple of minutes, I noticed a woman trying to address an envelope next to me. I quickly apologized for taking up the counter, and she sniffed and muttered "I asked you to move three times. You'd think you'd have heard me."

            Instantly, I was apologetic and mortified that I'd been one of those people I gripe and complain about all the time – the hogger. You know the type – they do whatever they want to do without paying the least bit of attention to anyone around them.

            Sheepishly, I realized I gripe about a lot of behaviors people exhibit in public, and I'd had just such an experience before going to the post office. Earlier that day, I ended up in the grocery store line behind a young mom.

            A tall blonde, wearing a diamond tennis bracelet and expensive jogging clothes, got in line behind me. A checker walked up and said she'd take the next person in line. The woman in the jogging suit made a bee-line to the open cashier and never looked back.

            The young mom in front of me was stewing but didn't say anything. Finally I leaned over my basket and said "Don't people like that really get to you?"

            Immediately she smiled and we had a pleasant conversation about impolite people who ignore the unspoken rule of grocery store etiquette – when a cashier opens up, the next person in line should go next, not the barracuda who lingers around the ends of the line, hoping to catch a freshly opened check-out line.

            "Karma will get her," I said to my new friend. "Karma has a long memory, and she never forgets."

            I'm a firm believer in what goes around comes around. When I was younger, I griped about people who walked all over others and never seemed to get what was coming to them.

            These types still aggravate me –they'll steal a parking spot even though you're sitting there with your blinker on and they run red lights because their time is more important than yours.

            But the older I've gotten, the more I see karma come around and "reward" these people for their rude and impolite behavior.

            That woman who cut in front of us in the grocery store line? I watched the wind smash two grocery carts into her driver's side door when she was putting her bags in the trunk.

            The person who stole the parking space will, sooner or later, have to park at the far end of the parking lot in the pouring rain, and people who run red lights invariably get pulled over by the police.

            You can only rob from karma for a short amount of time and then she wreaks her revenge.

            I needed to appease the kismet goddess, and I saw my chance when a young girl walked up to the post office counter to mail a shawl to a friend.

            She ended up having to buy a mailing box, but she didn't have any tape. I handed her the roll I'd just bought and told her to help herself.

            She was surprised but I said I was simply paying back the karma guardians. She laughed and said karma was definitely nothing to fool around with, and now she was bound to do something nice for somebody because, she said, "what goes around, comes around."  

            Even for we table hoggers.  

 This column was originally published in The Fort Bend Herald.