Mail Service

It wasn’t intentional, but a shortage in postage almost started a rift in the family bigger than the Grand Canyon.

Once upon a time, if your stamp didn’t stick, you could attach it to the envelope with sellotape (scotch tape to our American friends) . I did this on my eldest brother’s birthday card and he sent me a letter to say that he’d had to pay 20p (yes, just 20p or 34c) to receive it as the stamp thereon was considered invalid because of a piece of sellotape.

In those days, such charges were calculated at double the amount of the stamp shortfall so you can see I’m going back a bit as a standard letter now is 53p second class and 62p first.
Also, the postman would knock on your door for payment whereas today they put a card through the letter box saying there is a charge to pay and for you to collect your letter from the sorting office named thereon 5 hours after the delivery time.

The charge for Poster’s Error is now a minimum of £1 plus the shortfall in due postage. Bear in mind that here in the UK as well as our standard first and second class letter post, we have first and second class large letter post, first and second class packet (small parcel) post, plus first and second class medium parcel post. Parcel Post is yet another separate entity. You can see then that the Royal Mail is on to a winner when someone ‘short changes’ them on postage because they got the size, weight or shape wrong and thought their pre-purchased stamps would be sufficient.
Eldest Brother made such a fuss about this twenty sodding p that in retaliation I sellotaped a twenty pence coin to a ‘sorry’ card, and posted it to him, having checked the weight of the envelope at the Post Office  so that there could be no margin for error.

Disregarding all the slagging off he’d given me (and to anyone else who’d listen)  he later said his comment was meant as a joke.
I didn’t think so and said sweetly that reimbursing him was the least I could do. It was his birthday after all.

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