A Room with a Queue

Bending down to pick up a leaflet about Tax Returns, Keith spotted 5p resting next to the skirting board and thought carefully whether he could claim it as his own. It had never occurred to him that there would be skirting board in a Post Office, but its presence jolted him from the supposition that he was in a public place and therefore monies strewn about were fair game. This might well be coinage belonging to the Post Office itself, which would find the vaults short at the end of the day and blame everything on the luckless clerk who made the mistake of admitting to falling short on her first day. To save face, the hapless clerk would have to make it up out of her own pocket again, out of her own lowly wage, and this might probably be adding up to a hefty cumulative burden on the measly scrapings of the poor hatless clerk. Forced to survive on bread and cheese and cigarettes like Van Gough in his poorest years, her work would surely suffer and soon hundreds of pounds worth of incorrect postage stamps would be issued in error. This could only go on for so long before somebody would notice and trace the financial damage back to the station of the malnourished and confused clerk, each day a grinding cycle of hunger and fatigue, self pity and loathing for the position she was in, a position for which she only had herself to blame. Her demeanour suggested as much.

Keith, too sensitive a man to let even this calloused, wiry and prematurely aged buzzard punish herself any more, picked up the three coins (two tuppences and a penny) and presented them to the useless clerk. She gave him a look of contemptuous confusion as if he had just presented his two socks so that she might compare the smell, and accepted the coins onto the desk in plain sight. Keith knew his good deed was done for the day, used to the wrinkled nose and furrowed brow as the common reaction of his beneficiaries. They didn't have to be thankful when he helped them, or even ever at all realise they had been helped. To Keith it was enough to know that his good influence on the world made it's own way, contributing to the general harmony and pleasantness of life. On the way out, he treated himself to a giggle.

Ragga Twins - The Homeless Problem
(from Reggae Owes Me Money)