The awizo game

The British post office is unsophisticated by comparison. It concentrates on breaking things, losing letters and, occasionally, selling stamps. The Polish post office does all this too, but spends most of its time playing sadistic and perverted mind games with innocent foreigners. Its speciality is the awizo game, which is the post office equivalent of waterboarding. The CIA does not use the awizo game because it is considered too cruel.

To play the awizo game you will need one foreign idiot, one national postal system and a hell of a lot of pieces of paper. The game starts when somebody sends the foreign idiot a package that is too big to fit in Poland’s tiny letter boxes. Have a postman wait outside the foreign idiot’s house until he goes out. This can take a lot of patience, especially if the foreign idiot works at home or is deliberately staying in because he knows a package is coming. If you wait long enough though, he will eventually be forced to pop down to the shops rather than starve to death. At this point, the postman can emerge from his heavily camouflaged hiding place and makes a dash for the idiot’s letter box with an awizo.

When the victim returns from the shops two and a half minutes later he will frantically check his letter box and find the dreaded awizo hidden underneath 14 leaflets for pizza delivery companies, which, now he come to think of it, would have been a useful way of avoiding the necessity of going to the shops. Studying the awizo he will see the address of a local post office and go directly there. He will not read the part that says “after 6 pm” because he is, after all, a foreign idiot. At the post office he will discover he is too early and that the staff are more likely to spontaneously burst into flames than they are to check if the parcel might have come back already. He will then go home and completely forget to come back at 6.

Two days later the postman will deliver a new and bigger kind of awizo, rather than just bringing the parcel again. Mr Idiot will remember to wait until 6 o'clock, but will not read the small print on the back of the awizo telling him to go to a completely different post office. At the wrong post office he will discover his mistake and begin weeping quietly. Two more days will pass, during which the foreign idiot will refuse to go out in case the post office gets the crazy idea of delivering his package rather than another awizo. The post office will then deliver another awizo.

After reading the new awizo more carefully than a contract with Satan our hero will arrive at the correct post office at the right time, where he will join the wrong queue. Some time later he will finally get to the front of the right queue and triumphantly hand over his three awizos. The post office lady will study these documents as if they are rare examples of Egyptian hieroglyphics and demand to see some identification. Fortunately our foreigner will have heard of the necessity of carrying identity documents at all times in Poland and will have placed his passport in his jacket pocket some months before. He will not be wearing this jacket.

After a brief stay at a mental institution and some experimental anti-hysteria drugs, our much thinner and paler looking foreign fool will find the strength to return to the post office. He will arrive after 6 pm, wearing the jacket with the passport in the pocket, join the correct queue and hand over his collection of awizos with only the slightest of nervous twitches in his left eyelid. The post office lady will then inform him that his package has been returned to sender because he was too lazy to collect it. He will thank her, calmly leave the post office and live the rest of his life in a forest.

Jamie Stokes