Behind the Ironic Column

I’ve been a letter writer most of my life, and I’ve never liked the “boring” stamps.  You know the ones, the flags in all their variations, the Presidents of various years, the plain and uninteresting ones.  I prefer the commemoratives, even the ones that make a large picture which is destroyed as you take individual stamps off the sheet.  Once when there was a release of a new popular stamp, there were even lines at the post office just to buy them.  I went deliberately to a post office in a small town to buy my supply — no lines and a quick transaction.   I also pick them out to go with cards — birthday cards in particular need stamps that are cheerful and happy, if not directly related to the recipient.  I’ve never had anybody comment on that — so perhaps they’ve never noticed.  But it pleases me.  And I always have some of the boring ones around to pay bills.  I got caught recently having to pay a bill with one of my last Star Wars stamps — which took me a full minute of contemplation.  I had to decide which stamp I liked least and use that.

I’ve also been known to save past issues, against all sanity.  I’m not a stamp collector so my rationale for having a full set of those stamps from a few years back that commemorated each state is flimsy at best.  Still, I do have them, and they’ll probably still be in my stash of “stuff” that someone will look at or dispose of when I’m not longer around.  And they’ll undoubtedly wonder about my sanity — but then they’re probably going to be worrying about that already so I suppose it won’t matter much by then.  This does seem like an undue attention to stamps, considering that I’ve never been even remotely interested in collecting them.

All of that is simply a lead-in to the latest post office plan to make me buy the boring, or at least semi-boring, stamps.  Not that I have anything against the Liberty Bell.  I made a trip to see the Bell itself and it’s certainly a reasonable symbol to use.  As boring stamps go, the Liberty Bell is several notches up above the flag ones.  But the huge attraction to the Liberty Bell is that they have no marked denomination.  They’re good for whatever the first class postage rate is — so the ones you buy today at $.41 will still work in two weeks when postage goes up to $.42 — and are promised to work next year and the year after when postage keeps on creeping up.  If they’d put this program in place back when postage was a nickel, I could have stocked up for many years.  Besides the savings, the appeal of not having to figure out what the rate actually is this month is significant.  I don’t have to worry if this was the week the rates changed or not.  Whatever the rate is, this stamp works. 

Of course, the whole issue of postage stamps is becoming less relevant as more people use the internet for all transactions, financial or personal.  There are still a few things that I think are best done the old-fashioned, paper-based way.  And for those I’m using Liberty Bell.

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