Thank You USPS

Thank you U.S.P.S. for doing such a thorough job!

That's collectible only to show the gross waste of time that the USPS worker must have had on his hands to carefully place 6 lines of magic marker across each stamp. (I guess the media hype about the USPS clerks being so overworked must be all fiction.)

Yeah see now that's just unacceptable right there! Why?? I recently mailed out a large mailer to Jamesw and I decked it all out with stamps from the same era and the postal clerk actually said to me "what's all that?" I said US postage. She said WOW you oughtta hang on to all those! I said nah I got plenty. She then done something that surprised me...she asked me if I wanted to hand cancel them myself!?? I happily accepted her invitation and it made it to Canada un-marred. Usually they end up like the above illustration heavily inked by a magic marker or the blue ink-pen.. I'll never understand it. I know they want to be sure you can't re-use them but looks like someone done it in retaliation. To deface a pile of low denomination stamps that are obviously collectable, so I have to think that this (above) was done with an agenda of some type. I would be confident in assuming that it was an actual idiot that done that. There is no other reason for it, is there?

This is amusing for the reason I recently mailed an envelope with enough postage to be certified and to get a return receipt. It wasn't cancelled at the time, which was no biggie to me. On top of this, it wasn't scanned after getting picked up for the entire trip, and -though I won't know for sure until next week- I may not even get my return receipt!
Too bad we weren't swapped, you'd have visible stamps, and I'd have a track-able envelope.
I doubt it took a clerk more than 20 seconds to draw those lines.

Looks almost passive aggressive to me! The clerk maybe doesn't like stamp collectors, or the subject of the stamps.

Don

In the past year I have received several items (usually large envelopes or small packages) obliterated with marker cancellations; but never this thorough. This was done on a #10 envelope. I figure this was done by a frustrated postal clerk tired of having to add up so many small denominational stamps, they took their aggressions out on the stamps. The envelope was pretty beat up when received as well. Luckily the stamps inside survived.

Maybe some postal worker is patting themselves on the back for having developed a multiple Sharpie roller cancellation device?

I think I finally figured out what the postal clerk was doing, as I have seen postal clerks do something similar when they didn't have a calculator handy. Each line represents one cent. Six lines per 3c pair. They are adding up the stamps one cent at a time by drawing a line, to make sure it adds up to 49c. Trust me, it was probably faster and more accurate than for that particular postal worker to do it by multiplying.

As ILS noted, there are some really really nice and thoughtful postal clerks out there. They usually end up getting fired or transferred by their station managers for not meeting job description requirements.