Guess I'm officially an old fart now.

Here in Germany, the postal service usually delivers stuff to your door.
But when you're not home, it gets sent to one of their offices nearby.
And that happened a few days ago. Usually, they just put a card in your
mailbox which says where your package ended up.

Not this time.

I got an e-mail.

Wait, what? Am I even registered? I guess so. I must have forgotten.

Alright, so the e-mail said where I could pick up my package. And it
said: "Bring your ID and this e-mail." This e-mail? Oh dear. They
probably assume that everbody owns a smartphone and receives e-mail on
that thing. Not me, I'm sitting there in front of mutt at my
workstation.

Now, uhm ... what could "bring this e-mail" mean? Surely there must be
some kind of code or ID in that e-mail. Everything is a QR code these
days, so I looked for that. Nothing. No attachments. I did find the
"number" of my package, though ("Sendungsnummer"). So I guess that's the
information they want to see.

Should I just write down that number? Probably not, they probably want
to see "the" e-mail, so I assumed I had to print that thing. Bit of a
challenge, since -- of course -- it's an HTML e-mail and mutt just
displays text. Will they accept a plain text version of it? Hopefully.

So I hit "print".

My printer started printing. It's in another room. It didn't stop
printing. After a while, it dawned on me: It's printing the HTML source
code. Of course. Oh god. Endless pages of garbage. Why, oh why, does
this have to be a gigantic HTML e-mail? Oh, sure, so they can put
tracking pixels in there. God dammit.

Fine. How do you print an HTML e-mail from mutt, but rendered as plain
text? No idea. I have an entry in my `~/.mailcap` that invokes elinks on
HTML mails, but it surely didn't do that when I was trying to print. So
I copied the darned thing to Vim (the rendered text output from elinks)
and printed it from there.

Finally.

Okay. So I left the house and went to their office. To my surprise,
almost nobody was there, which is nice. Usually, you have to wait in
their office for like 30 minutes. It was also nice that, due to
Coronavirus, only one person was allowed in that office. I was already
preparing mentally to be shamed to death, because I went to a post
office with a printed e-mail in my hand. You have to know: The German
postal service used to be the most backward and antiquated organization
one can think of, but now they are *too modern* for me and *I* am the
antiquated one. I'm standing there like an idiot with that piece of
paper in my hand. Ugh. Buuuuut, since I'm the only person allowed in
there, nobody would know. Phew.

I told the girl behind the desk that I wanted to pick up a package. As I
was trying to show her the bloody printed e-mail, she says: "Oh, no, I
don't need that." She just went on, glanced at my ID, and handed me a
package.

Uhm.

Yeah.