Seventeen steps to cereal

1. Get on the Line 20 Bus.
2. Realize that the Line 20 Bus is not following Line 20 today, and you’re about to end up very far away from the post office.
3. Get off the bus, and hail a taxi. Agree to pay 500 CFA.
4. Arrive at the post office, and receive your delivery slip.
5. Take the delivery slip to the back room, where a very friendly (if creepy) man finds your package.
6. Carry the package back into the front room to a man sleeping at his desk. Wake the sleeping man up.
7. Sleepy Man tells you “Those packages don’t belong to you yet! Put them back!” You return to the back room, surrender your package, and head back to Sleepy Man.
8. Sleepy Man writes some information down on a piece of paper.
9. You bring this piece of paper about five feet across the room, to the adjacent desk, where a man is busy doing crossword puzzles. Crossword Puzzle Man writes something else down in a log book. (That is Crossword Puzzle Man’s job: to write things down in a book.)
10. Following Crossword Puzzle Man’s direction, you go out to the cashier, where you have to pay 2500 CFA for “import duties,” a thinly veiled euphemism for bribes.
11. Now you’re done in the Customs Service part of the building. Time to head out back into the regular Post Office section, even though they are basically the same room.
12. You wait at the Post Office cashier’s window. You find out from the man in the adjacent window that the cashier is on break for the next 50 minutes. This man is just sitting there, but “it’s not [his] job” to help you, even though you can clearly see your packages in the back room, just waiting to be taken home and the granola bars inside devoured.
13. You get frustrated and, bending the rules, sneak into the back room. Friendly-Creepy Man is taking a nap on his desk — literally splayed out on his desk with a blanket. It’s his break, too. He can’t help us, even though the packages are about 10 centimeters from his head.
14. After some haggling and raised voices, he agrees to take your “post office tax” of 1000 CFA (bribe number two, which is completely arbitrary and made up on the spot) and give it to the cashier later.
15. You grab your packages and run into the “fresh” air of Dakar, shaking with anger at how fucking stupid and inefficient bureaucracies are. Twelve people to do one person’s job.
16. Take another taxi for 500 CFA, grasping your package like a first-born child.
17. But then you open the package and see Cinnamon Toast Crunch and fiber pills and you’re mildly OK with having paid almost $10 and three hours for something that should have been free and 15 minutes.