Back in the mid 1990s I was a contractor for the USPS, in their Stamp Services department at headquarters. I did technical editing, basically cleaning up the grammar in reports about stamp production and security. I also wrote responses to letters that the USPS received from customers about stamps.
The letters gave me some insight into humanity, boy howdy. For example, I came on board right after there was a brouhaha about a sheet of stamps called Legends of the West. They featured cowboys, and one of the stamps featured Black rodeo performer Bill Pickett’s younger brother, Ben Pickett, instead of Bill. The USPS recalled the misprinted sheets, but some of them were already out in circulation, so the USPS decided to have a lottery and release 150,000 sheets of the misprinted stamps at face value. The rule was that there could be only one sheet per household through the lottery, but some households entered multiple times and some households won more than one sheet. Also, resellers entered the lottery, which was against the rules, and some of them won and then turned around and sold the sheets for lots of money.
I had NO IDEA how angry stamp collectors could get over something like that. The letters poured in, at least two mail sacks full of outrage, and there I was, naive to the world of philately, sorting the letters in alphabetical order, entering addresses into a database, and printing out responses. It took me three months, but my then-boss had it worse: She had to sign the things by hand. I’mma boast a bit and share that they made me Employee of the Month for dealing with all of it after my third month there.
Then there was the guy who wrote in from prison. One of the guys I worked with was assigned to HQ for a year from Pittsburgh, where he was a warden before joining the USPS. I brought the letter over to him before I opened it and said, “Rick, one of yours?”
His eyes got huge and he said, “Put that down! Don’t open that without wearing gloves. You don’t know what kind of…bodily fluids…might be on that.”
It was a valid warning. The letter consisted of about six pages of demands, including how its author felt it was his right to mate with every woman in the United States, starting with those who worked for the USPS. Ewwwwww.
Then there were the ladies who wrote in on flowery stationery, by hand, to complain about that year’s Madonna and Child stamp. The baby Jesus was nude and oh my GAWD, you’d think the USPS was peddling child pornography. How dare they show Jesus’s penis? What kind of perverts ran the post office? On and on. All I could think was, “Wait a second. You are sexualizing an infant and you want to know who the pervert is?”
That year was also the year they released the first Bugs Bunny stamp. Oh, the outrage over THAT was just ridiculous. How dare the USPS put a CARTOON character on a stamp? But hey, I actually met Bugs Bunny when he came by the big holiday bash that year, so nanny-nanny boo-boo to those Scrooges.
That board with all the stickies on it behind us on the right was a riot. They had a photographer come in a couple of weeks before the party and take pictures of everyone, including sneaky candids when folks weren’t looking. We put the pictures up on the board and stickies were captions submitted by guests. Gotta say, that was a fabulous party. I should have taken photos of the office because I was tasked with decorating for the whole shebang.
I loved my time there, enough so that if I wasn’t so set on being a health writer, I’d have put in an application to be an official USPS employee. Plus, they had great swag back then, like these two beauties.
Oh, lawd, people complained about the Midnight Angel stamp, too. How dare the USPS have a “Christmas Traditional” stamp without Jesus on it? AND WHY IS IT SELF-STICK?!?!? (Stamp collectors HATED the self-stick stamps because they couldn’t be mounted on hinges like the lick’ems.)
It’s a beautiful stamp, though, eh? One of the most beautiful I’ve ever seen, actually.
And now for tonight’s state Christmas tree, going out to my friend Don, who absolutely does not miss Maine winters. Don and I have the same quirky sense of humor and he has me in stitches every time I see him. When my city-hiking buddies and I get together for various and sundry non-hiking events, it’s a fair bet that at some point Don and I will be off to the side cracking up about something, and that something will often be inappropriate to repeat to clergy. Here’s to you, Don!
