I Don't *Heart* the USPS Bureaucrats

Younger Daughter received the cute wedding ring/wedding cake stamps last week that I had ordered online so she could mail her elegant wedding invitations (that require extra postage, of course).  I did a Little Rock road trip over the weekend to go to a few parties -- lingerie shower and welcome-home-to-The-Son -- so we spent Friday evening stamping and stuffing all those envelopes.  We couldn't deposit them in a mailbox, though, because the return address labels weren't ready (somehow, we neglected to have return address labels printed on the envelopes, and the sweet young friend who addressed all those envelopes didn't have the strength to do returns).

Guess what happened on Sunday?

Yep.  Postal rates went up for "oddly-shaped first class items." 

Yep -- 3 cents per.

Who knew that a square is an "odd" shape that makes things heavier?

The USPS doesn't make cute wedding-ish 3 cent stamps.

Younger daughter wants this to be over with, so she couldn't wait out having custom stamps made from one of those neat websites out there, and I didn't want to argue with her about it.  "I want them out of my house," she said through teeth that I could hear clenching up over the phone.  (That small voice in my head whispered, "Choose your battles," and I chose to heed the voice.)

At least she didn't go all "postal" in the Post Office substation when she got the bad news after going in to check whether the rate increase we heard about on the Sunday news briefs would apply in this circumstance.  I think she might have gotten a little teary-eyed, though, because the kindly Post Office clerk told her she could probably give it a shot and maybe they'd let the invitations slip through since it's so close to the rate change.  But, she didn't want to take the chance of having all those invitations being returned for insufficient postage, and a line was developing behind her. 

A kind lady in line behind her expressed sympathy for this latest pothole in the road to wedded bliss and asked how many extra stamps she would need.  When Younger Daughter sweetly, yet tersely, replied, "Two hundred sixty," the kind lady's face kinda drained of color and she repeated her sympathies.  She did not, however, offer to help re-stamp all those invitations.

*sigh*