Alison says:
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. I brought them back to the post office, where the surprisingly friendly staff explained that since the simple act of spinning my envelope 90 degrees increased my postage to 58 cents. So I bought the extra stamps and sent the invitations on their merry way. Friends emailed and called to say they received their invites. All but one, that is, because one invitation was returned to me AGAIN. This time the post office was asking for 22 more cents.
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.
Reader comment:
Michael says:
I work in a post office, so I think I can clear up some of this, but mind you this is off the top of my head.
We have a template that shows the acceptable fraction of height to width for a standard 41 cent letter. Now, while you might think it would be the same either way, remember what has to read this: Machines. If it doesn't fit the template, it won't fit through the machine correctly, and has to be sorted differently. 58 cents is the postage for an oversize envelope (Or one that is 1-2 ounces.)
Now where do the other numbers come in? I couldn't explain the 80 cents, because it is not a common charge, but $1.13 sounds like it was mailed as a "flat," which is in line with most sheet-sized manila envelopes, because it failed one of the maximum dimensions for a letter, namely the height. The first group sent back probably occurred when they were loading letters into the machine scanner, while the last one may have simply been a random occurrence of over-zealous postmaster.
What can you do to prevent this in the future? Well, obviously, not do this again, believe me, its a hassle for the postal employees too… we're not just out to get you! But other than that, mail them at the post office. They can tell you exactly if anything is wrong with the postage, and also you might get a lenient or simply nice one who will postmark it before accepting it, which effectively states that this envelope is OKed. You might have some luck, or you might get someone explaining the same thing I did and require you to pay more.
Good luck!
