The Senegalese Locksmith: Part 3

Today I had what I thought would be the third part of making things right after losing my keys - I had to get a new key to my post box. Now, usually the post office is minimally helpful. If I need something done, they'll do it but only to the least extent they have to (as an aside, this isn't different than most businesses in Senegal). I went in this morning and explained the situation... and was told to come back at 3pm then I could have a new key - easy enough!

At 3pm I showed up at the post office and the guy who I had talked to earlier went to get his boss/the head of the post office (who apparently doesn't work mornings). The guy started yelling at me in Wolof for losing my key. I made him switch to French. He yelled some more about making me lose my key. As the good fake-Wolof I am, I started yelling at him about how I needed him to give me a key. Then he yelled that he couldn't give me a key. So I started yelling, "so it's done? forever? that box is closed forever? it can never be opened again?!" and he didn't disagree. So I told him I wanted to buy a new box and that really set him off. He COULDN'T have me pay for a new box because I would ABSOLUTELY lose the key again then I would come back and get another box and lose the key and keep doing all of that until I had lost all of the keys for all of their boxes.

Refusing to acknowledge his offensive, patronizing manor for losing a stupid key (which, fyi, I think those might have been the first set of keys I've ever misplaced in my life) AND refusing to get into a discussion of his poor business skills - JUST SELL ME ANOTHER BOX. I yelled at him for being ridiculous. While we'd been yelling back and forth like good Wolof people, we'd created quite a scene and everyone in the post office (all 5 people) were paying attention and laughing along. I finally told him that if he wasn't going to give me a new key or box, I was going to make the people at the post office check my box for me whenever I wanted to know if there was something. I gave him the ultimatum of, "I can do the work or you can do the work," and that drove him into the back office...

...only to come back with a spare key for my box! He patronized me for losing the key a little more and I told him I was going to make 5 copies of the key and give them all back to him. I paid my 1000cfa ($2) and strutted out with my new key. Bambey does not have a place to copy keys so this weekend I'm going to make a ton of copies of the key and put them all in my mailbox for the people at the post office to see!

KO