postal Efficiency part 2
When I first got the invitations, I fully assembled one and took it to the local post office. Yes, for those of you who read the blog on the stamps… it would be THAT other post office. I handed the postal employee my fully loaded invitation and asked how much it would take to send. She weighed it and tacked on a “stiff envelope” charge of 17 cents and told me that it would be 75 cents. So I bought 75 cent stamps.
Fast forward. We got the correct RSVPs, created an assembly line to put together the invitations, and got the invites out the next day. Phew! A weight was lifted off of my shoulders. Two days later, the weight was back, and heavier than ever. There was a wedding invitation in our mailbox, which would be fine, except it was OURS with a big red stamp on it of a hand with a pointing finger that said “Insufficient Postage” with handwriting that said Large envelope price of 98 cents, 23 cents due.
NONONONONONO! I did everything right! I checked went to the post office ahead of time! I had visions of 80 invitations coming back. So much for the 6 weeks before the wedding… AAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRGGG!
So we went online to see what the definition of a large envelope was and sure enough, we qualified by 1/8 of an inch. My fiance kindly put “take invitation back to post office” on his honey-do wedding list, knowing that I might “go postal” on the postal employee.
He took it back to “that” post office where the employee put the envelope on their little guide. My fiance said that the line was designating envelope sizes was pretty thick (about an 1/8 of an inch, I would imagine) and that if you went by the inside of the line, our envelope was too big, but if you went by the outside of the line, we barely fit. The employee stood by the previous person’s decision of 75 cents. She tore off the bar code sticker placed on the envelope by the post office that sent it back, crossed out the big red hand and the other writing and plopped it back into the outgoing mail. She explained that the postal service was going through a big reclamation project in effort to get all of the lost revenue from people using incorrect postage. We just hit an over aggressive mail handler.
“Does the fact that the stamp has been postmarked stop it from going?”, asked my fiance.
“No”, she said, “It did not reach its destination, so it is fine.” Huh? I hadn’t heard that before. Perhaps she was one of the big revenue losers within the post office. We fully expected to see that thing back, as well as a few others.
I am happy to report while that invitation had to be the ugliest one that we sent, it did not come back, but an RSVP did. We did not have any other invitations sent back to us, thankfully.
Invitations |