Item in Boing Boing yesterday. Alison tries to “get funky” with her wedding invitations and gets slapped with a surcharge:
I thought you’d get a kick out of the ridiculousness that is the United States Postal “Service.” I’m getting married at the end of the summer and am using a lovely red No 10 standard size envelope. The problem is that I decide to get funky. Instead of addressing the envelopes normally, I decided to orient the envelope vertically and put the stamp at the top (what would be the lower right-hand corner in a normal horizontal envelope).
Since the envelope is still the same size, I mistakenly thought that the postage would be 41 cents. Oh how I was wrong! My invitations all came back to me asking for 17 more cents. [ How to spend $1.13 mailing a letter that should be 41 cents ]
Of course, if you turn an envelope 90 degrees — and address it that way — it’s no longer the same size. It might take up the same amount of space, but the dimensions are different. If you have difficulty understanding that, imagine ordering a widescreen television only to discover it had been turned ninety degrees. I doubt you would be thrilled.
The USPS is notoriously accomodating, but when you decide to color outside the lines you shouldn’t be surprised when you get unpredictable results.
Tedious sob-story whines about the cost of postage constantly increasing, the price of first-class stamps has roughly tracked inflation. In fact, according to the CPI Inflation Calculator mailing a first-class letter is actually cheaper in adjusted dollars today than in 1981. This despite a growing population and dramatic changes in mail delivery over the past twenty-five years. A good reason why this is so cheap is automation. With automation comes rules. And when those rules aren’t followed, things don’t work the way they should. Alison’s “funky” mail costs an extra $0.17? Boo-freaking-hoo. What does she want for nothing?
The Boing Boing contributor continues:
So I returned to the post office and was told that the previous post office employee who told me that the envelopes were 58 cents was wrong. And the postal employee who thought that the envelope should’ve been 80 cents and returned it to me again was also wrong. Instead the envelope should be $1.13 and I owed 55 more cents to mail the letter. Apparently, I was lucky that the other 47 invitations were mailed out and delivered in a timely fashion. They all should’ve been $1.13, not 58 cents.
When I asked the postal employee how I could insure that any of my other letters would be delivered if no one seemed to know the correct postage she didn’t have a good answer for me.
“Didn’t have a good answer” can mean lots of things. I’ve given many good answers in my day that have been rejected because the answer was not what the questioner wanted to hear. Or perhaps the postal worker did say “I have no good answer for you,” which could mean “I have an answer, but your question is just more passive-aggressive posturing.” Which is usually what I mean when I say it.
The real answer, of course, is “follow packaging guidelines” which can be found here for first class mail. Note in particular the requirements on length and height of an envelope, as well as a definition of what “length” is:
Rectangular
At least 3-1/2 inches high X 5 inches long X .007 inch thick
No more than 6-1/8 inches high X 11-1/2 inches long X 1/4 inch thick
Maximum weight is 3.5 ounces
Letters that are considered nonmachinable are subject to a surcharge.
Length is the dimension parallel to the address.
Alison’s mail clearly doesn’t fit those guidelines, which means she didn’t bother to look them up before dropping her mail off. If Alison is incapable of reading and following instructions, heaven knows how she will decide to get funky next. So as long as the USPS is not in telepathic contact with Alison and Alison continues to think it’s the USPS’s job to deliver whatever she wants no matter how she addresses it, I guess there really is no good answer.
Oh. An extra raspberry to Mark Frauenfelder of Boing Boing. As the editor of Make, he ought to have known enough about mechanical requirements and engineering tolerances not to have run this self-important whinge in the first place.
