Special Delivery

"I'm sorry we don't ship to P.O. Boxes. Can you give me your physical address," says the person taking my phone order.
I sigh. "Well, I could give you my physical address, but I know you won't ship to it. I'll give you . . . ."
"Fed Ex will ship anywhere." Heavy emphasis on anywhere. This person has obviously watched CastAway too many tmes.
"They won't ship here," I say full of the knowledge gleaned from approximately 287 such encounters in the past fifteen years.
Sigh from order-taking-person. "Just give me the address and I'll decide that."
"Fine." I rattle off the legal land description - the physcial address of a quarter section of land that is approximately twenty miles from the nearest town of 4,000 and approximately thirteen miles from the nearest hamlet of about 100. Where our post office is. And I hear the pause that I always hear whenever I do this. I wait, letting this sink in. It's petty of me. I know. I just don't like being treated with condescension. I've lived with teenagers. Now that the kids are all grown up condescension is no longer welcome in my home. In all my years of ordering online and over the phone, no delivery company in the entire English speaking world has EVER brought ANYTHING to my door yet. Not UPS, not Canada Post, not Purolator, not FedEx, not DHL. None of these friendly delivery people has ever driven the long miles down our gravel roads to pull up to my house with a smile and a package. Nor will they. I realize that most of these ordering places are located in the city. I understand that many of these ordering people think that the country they drive through to get from one city to another is simply there for their inconvenience. I would like these ordering type people to check out Google Earth and look at the endless amounts of roadway that cut through all the country between cities and realize that people live on those roads. And that delivery companies will most probably NOT go that extra mile to bring a package to my door. I don't have time to educate this person, however, and I'm not patient enough to try to explain that not everyone in the world lives on a paved street with street lights outside their house and that the only way I can get high speed internet is to plunk a satellite dish on the top of my house because cable companies won't drag themselves this far out either. Do you sense some frustration? You are very astute. Trouble is now that I HAVE high speed internet, I can order stuff online even faster. And every time I do I have to explain once again why I'm getting these people to deliver their stuff to the store in our small town. Where, by the way, the post office is located.