I went to buy a birthday card today, and there is a whole new series of cards out there, by Hallmark I think, called “Fresh Ink.”
You pick your card, then you pick your envelope. All the cards are sqaure, but there are two sizes of envelope, rectangular and square. The square envelopes say “11 cents extra postage required for square envelopes.”
I thought postage was by weight, not by geometry. “Hmmm, your card is a rhombus, that’s gonna cost you…”
What gives? Is there special sorting required for square envelopes or is this yet another postal conspiracy?
I guess that means that if you rotate the location of the address, stamp, etc. on a regular envelope 90[sup]o[/sup] you’ll have to pay extra. Fascinating.
It is a mechanical sorting issue.
I am a letter carrier amd I can tell you that all “oversized” envelopes come separate from the machined mail. They are not in sequence and have to be sorted by hand. Keep in mind that our routes have over 600 addresses each. It takes extra time to sort these, both by the carriers and everyone else up the line.
write “free matter for the blind” where the stamp goes.
use one of those wildlife stamps you always get around christmas.
This actually works for postage, I guess no one pays too much attention to envelopes as long as there appears to be a stamp affixed. Reckon I wouldn’t use this method if it absolutely has to get there on time, but then it never does anyway!
I’ve always considered photocopying the stamp area of one of those “business reply–prepaid postage” things (magazine subscription cards, billing return envelopes, etc) onto my own envelopes, but I never liked the idea of relocating to Kansas. (whaddaya wanna bet I have to explain the Kansas reference?)
Here’s why I THINK some of the free mail schemes mentioned above won’t fly. (Mind you, these are just my theories.)
Real stamps (and meter strips) use ultraviolet ink. This is what triggers a sensor in the sorting/cancelling/routing machine to position the letter address-side-forward and right-side-up so the keyboard operator can read the address and scoot the letter to the right zip code. I would also imagine a letter w/o a UV stamp gets spit out for special handling, whereupon a pair of human eyes might see the bogus stamp and go “WTF?” (or, “Get me the Postal Police”).
Most cards/letters bearing a Return Mail/ Non-Profit/ Bulk Mail/ Presort/ Permit indicia also bear bar codes that tell the routing machine: 1. where to send the piece of mail 2. the postage cost, and 3. the business account that will be billed for that amount. Thus the bar codes do all the work before it gets to a human handler; the indicia itself is basically window dressing.
Actually, there are some (perfectly legal) tricks that you can use to speed up your mail, by making things easier for the post office. The first is to type out your addresses, rather than write them: Typed text can be read by an OCR computer, so a human needs never handle it. Secondly, always use the full nine-digit zip code. Third, you can actually produce bar codes for the ZIPs, the same as the Post Office uses-- I believe that WordPerfect has a tool to create them. I’m too lazy and unhurried to bother with these most of the time, but my dad always does. His letters always arrive the next day, and packages take between one and three days.
A person who would defraud the blind and commit a crime to save 33 cents is the lowest person in the history of the universe. They should get cancer and die, except that cancer is too good for them.
Me thinks you miss the point lad, we’re talking of defrauding the gov’t, not the blind. The blind do not pay for it, it is only yet another loophole our gov’t provides to those in the know.
As one who remembers when there were two hand deliveries monday through Friday,and one on Saturday-----all of them without benefit of machinery,and at a time when envelopes came in all shapes and sizes, I wonder what type of institution the inmates are running?
And before anyone sets up a howl let me point out that the “old neighborhoods” where all of this used to happen haven’t grown at all in the number of residences or people.
The postal folk have earned the “snail mail” tag—and now they’re automated to boot!
It’s like their ZIP system—who really needed it—the machine?
Fair enough, bare than we will do this the official way.
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