Marker Monkey Strikes Again

I have joined the Club - hit by the Marker....

I'm the editor of the Vermont Phiiatelist and very quarter my principal writer sends his covers to be scanned to me in a priority mail envelope ($7.70) on which he uses a number of recent US commemoratives. Today when I went to the PO counter to pick up the priority envelope, I was upset to see that all the stamps had been marked in black with a magic marker. I asked the clerk why he had done that and he said that he was doing revenue protection since the stamps were not all cancelled by the sending office. There are 17 stamps on the envelope and when I mentioned that every one of them was postmarked he said "NO! There is one that was not!" However, on closer examination I pointed out to him that there black bars from the CDS extending into the stamp. He said that the black bars were part of the stamp design, he had never seen a CDS with bars.

I'm usually a very mild mannered person, but when he said to me that he knew I was a stamp collector and saw that I use a lot of old stamps on my outgoing mail that I had taken off envelopes and reused, I lost my cool and told him that all he had to do was mark the so-called uncancelled stamp and left the rest alone. Then he said it was the other post offices fault because the cancels weren't dark enough. I have no problem with the post office making sure that uncancelled stamps aren't used again, but in this case the rest of the stamps were all cancelled. And he had time when he was sorting to check each stamp to make sure they were cancelled.

http://glennestus.com/MagicMarker.jpg

I would have rather loudly asked for his name and employee ID number and a copy of the consumer complaint form.

The only advice I can offer, is to bin the example,
carry on, get busy, and within a week the anger disolves.

Obviously this person has a problem of his/her own,
It is the individual that is at fault, we cannot change that.

My plastered covers gets met with "We were all admiring the stamps on your parcels, Rodney"

As a collector, I deplore the "magic marker" cancellations. But, I recognize that the clerk was doing his job as proscribed. Collectors have to realize that the job of the USPS is to deliver mail, not cater to them.

I disagree, the job suggests staff may cancel, uncancelled stamps by marker.
Secondly, they do cater for collectors, we are a major part of their income.

The thing you may wish to realise, is that we all need to act with sensitivity to all things. Respect.