Stamps Dot Con
Posted on | March 21, 2007 at 5:11 pm | 3 Comments
This morning I had some bill payments and a LaLa trade to snail mail, so I stopped at the Post Office on my way to work. I went inside because I’m almost out of stamps and needed to get some. N said she saw on the news yesterday that the PO was definitely going to start issuing the “forever stamps” (previously mentioned in this entry) and the TV news report made it sound like they were available right away. So she said I should check into getting some. When I mentioned them to the postal clerk, she went ballistic, laughing maniacally and going “What does that mean? What does that even mean – Forever?? How does that work? Why does everyone keep asking me that? All I know is that the first class stamp is going up to 41 cents on May 14th.” I think she was drunk at 8am.
After recovering from my initial shock that a postal employee didn’t know about postal-related matters, I attempted to explain how it was a stamp that you could buy at the current first class rate and use forever without additional postage even if the rates go up. She kept saying “I just don’t understand how that works – will the postage rate be on the stamp?” Luckily, one of the other clerks wandered back in at that point and caught the end of the conversation. She verified what I was saying to the first clerk, though she said she heard they wouldn’t be available until after the rate increase, so the first forever stamps would be 41 cents, not 39. She also told the other clerk that they would have some sort of generic “forever” designation on them instead of the postage. I bought my one book of 39 cent stamps and hastily made my way out of there, as the clerk continued to cackle like a loon behind me. I felt like I was in a shaky horror movie where the camera weaves spastically around the demented person’s face from below as she laughs and pulls out an axe. After this incident and the one with Safeway Fiber Guy, I’m really beginning to wonder if I have a strange effect on service industry people that brings out the otherworldly in them.
Stop crossing over into my dimension, you aliens!
Latre.
Comments
3 Responses to “Stamps Dot Con”
March 22nd, 2007 @ 10:38 am
It amazes me how little some of the Postal employees I’ve had the dubious pleasure of interacting with understand or care about how the services operate. I still remember talking on the phone with one who kept insisting that the rates we had in the computer didn’t match the book. Turns out the book they were using was two years old, and the only current book in the entire facility was kept locked in the supervisor’s desk.
March 22nd, 2007 @ 9:06 pm
My favorite is that every post office in the area, about a year or so ago, removed all visible clocks from all the walls. Apparently, they didn’t want the public to know how long they might have been waiting in line (or so several post office workers at a couple locations told me). I’m not sure what the point of that is: most people wear watches, and many people who don’t have cell phones or other devices with a time readout – not to mention that, hey, the annoyance of waiting a long time in line is not particularly improved by knowing whether it was 20 or 25 minutes. Are they assuming that if people complain and claim they spent 25 minutes waiting in line, they can just say, well how do you know that – there are no clocks in the post office?
March 22nd, 2007 @ 10:59 pm
I also have stories about poor customer service at post offices.