Fruitcake lady

WILMINGTON, Delaware-- A judge dismissed a Delaware woman's suit against the U.S. Postal Service but agreed that a rude clerk didn't help the post office's "lamentable reputation."

Lucille Greene, now 88, said in her lawsuit that she tripped and fell outside the Magnolia Post Office in December 2002 after leaving in tears when a clerk made fun of the Christmas fruitcakes she was mailing. The clerk accepted the packages but he also shook them and jokingly asked Greene if she was trying to send bombs.

Chief U.S. District Judge Sue Robinson, who heard the case in a bench trial, found that Greene's existing eye problems were to blame for her fall, the Wilmington (Del.) News Journal reported. But she laid into the clerk and the post office, saying that an apology appears to be "an obsolete gesture," the News Journal report read

Government lawyers, contending that the clerk did apologize, have asked the judge to revise her opinion.

Greene still makes her fruitcakes from her mother's secret recipe and has added her lawyer to her list. But she now goes to a more distant post office in Lincoln, Del., where she says the staff are "always nice," the newspaper said