To Mail or not to mail

I don’t mail many things now days. Not because I don’t like mail  but because the only thing I used to mail regularly was bills and now I pay those all electronically.

But the other day I actually needed to mail something. You know a simple letter, just an envelope with a piece of paper in it, should take just a single stamp. No worries.

Was I wrong.  You see I just needed a single stamp. Now, one used to able to buy stamps out of ATMs or at Wells Fargo ATMs, which was super slick. But for some reason they removed that capability. Don’t know why, probably some contract dispute. The post office probably wanted to be paid the equivalent of having a post office employee standing there handing out the stamps, for each ATM. Probably kind of spendy.

So I stopped at the local US Postal substation on the way home from work. I walk into the lobby looking for one of those stamp dispensing machines. And I remembered that the last time I was in a substation they did have them though they no longer took cash and did not dispense individual stamps. Well, this substation did that one one better. They did not have any stamp vending machines whatsoever. Zero, less than 1, nada. Huh?

So I get in line. Not unusual length even as post office lines go. The usual, totally expected things go on at the counter. Someone trying to mail some massively heavy item and somehow astounded at the cost, someone trying to figure out how return mail works. You know, the usual.

So I am standing there feeling guilty that I am in this slowly moving line holding up people behind me and all I want is a stamp. One stamp. But clearly I have no options. I observe that the clerks are even doing a good job considering the diversity of requests they are getting. I am OK with the progress and finally get my stamp.

But I wander out thinking about the stamps that are no longer in the ATM machines, the lack of vending machines in the post office lobby and recall the other day the US Postal Service looking for money to keep going.

I’m thinking, money, you want money, are you kidding, I just walked by the money.

Now I am not in favor of having people lose their jobs, except that one guy I worked with in college who as a total tool and should have been fired. Anyway, I’d be willing to guess that the major source of expense for the USPS is labor. So why are you having  a guy hand me a stamp when I could have actually gotten it much faster from a machine. Less labor, happier customer.

Oh well, that’s nothing new.

 So at the end of last week I knew I was tired at work when I was writing a note out and I needed to reference receiving something by fax or e-mail. I would typically write that like “Need to be able to receive by fax/e-mail blah, blah, blah.” But instead I wrote “need to be able to receive by fax slash e-mail.” It was like I was using dictation software and it wrote exactly what I said. Yikes.

And then I was typing a note about needing some “error queues” to clean up work.  I actually typed and fortunately caught before sending was “Eros queues.” It was clearly wrong but I bet I would get much more interest in the concept of Eros queues.  Maybe if we combined them it could be like an advice column called “Errors of Eros” where you can learn how to avoid romantic blunders or share them. Call for advice right now…

This entry was posted on 29. March 2009 at 13:03 and is filed under Permusations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.