the rest of the stamp story

I was really lucky today. When I got to the post office, hardly anyone was in line ahead of me and I only had to wait a couple of minutes. I bought a couple of books of very froofy-looking purple stamps for the invitations (which appeared on the receipt as "wedding stamps" -- how did they know?) as well as some two-cent stamps so we can use the tons of 37-cent stamps I recently unearthed. I noticed something interested as I waited: the back wall of the post office is usually stocked with stuff you can buy, like stamps and mailing supplies. The mailing supplies were still there, but no stamps whatsoever.

I asked the guy behind the counter about the problems we'd had trying to buy stamps. He nodded as though he'd had to explain this one before.

Apparently, the post office used to hire people specifically to restock stamps in machines, on the walls, and so forth. However, these jobs were recently eliminated. So instead of regional stamp-restockers, individual post offices are having to train existing workers to stock stamps. The training is underway but at this time, no one is yet qualified to perform the highly skilled tasks. Therefore, none of the stamp machines in Austin have stamps available, and won't for awhile.

He recommended I use the automated postal machines if I needed stamps after hours and could use a debit/credit card to buy them. You can buy sheets of 18 stamps at a time, he told me. I pointed out that we'd tried that, but the postal machine didn't work last night. That's right, he remembered, it had been out of stamps. But it was refilled now. He didn't know about the routine maintenance that shut down the machine at the Far West branch.

I am wondering how long it takes to train someone to put stamps in a vending machine or on a wall display. I am also wondering how it is easier to restock an automated postal machine than it is to restock a vending machine. But I don't know much about the world of the post office, so maybe I'm missing some critical information. At any rate, I didn't linger and chat with the postal worker because when I looked behind me, I saw a large group of people all waiting in line to buy stamps and mail packages. I was certainly lucky to get to the post office before they did.

The Beau and I realized last night what we should have done in the first place, had we planned ahead. No, I don't mean that we should have purchased the stamps some time ago because we knew we'd need them for the invitations. I mean that we should have bought stamps from a Web site where you can upload an image to print onto the stamp (assuming it's an image that meets the postal standards, etc.). We are so dumb not to have realized the perfect postage: We could have decorated all our invitations with a little photo of our cat Rufus T. Firefly's adorable little face, right there on the stamp. What a wasted opportunity.

Posted at April 18, 2006 04:01 PM