Stamps
Our neighborhood post office is around the corner from Our Town’s so-called Music Row where all the publishers and recording studios and country music jocks hang out. There’s a whole wall in there that’s more or less covered with 8×10 glossies of all the stars. One’s holding her guitar like a rifle. She signed it, “This is a holdup. I want all your Elvis stamps.” Most all try to come up with something cute, but not always so dated.
I was in there the other day to mail our 1040 ES and to meet Uncle Sugar’s September deadline. Just showing up over there reminds me of Johnny Carson’s rhetorical, “Do you know what the PO does with all those postage price increases? It buys 250,000 new ‘Next Window Please’ signs, that’s what.”
The line was long. There’re four “windows,” two of them sporting “next window please” signs. There was a time when the same PO claimed that if you had to wait more than fifteen minutes for service, you’d get a free first-class stamp. They don’t make that offer any more. When I finally got to a clerk, I spent five bucks on Return-Receipt-Requested-Certified-Mail postage for to mail our check to the Dallas IRS. I asked the postal clerk if he thinks it’s really necessary to send tax returns and quarterly estimate payments that way. As he took my money, he turned on his usual Charm School 101 consumer confrontation, looked over his shoulders both ways, and said, “I always send mine by e-mail.”