At the Trade Deadline 22: A Postage Due Zistle Trade Delivery

Baseball Card Breakdown recently ran a post lamenting the receipt of a dreaded Postage Due card from the Post Office. It seems like there is nothing worse than getting one of those cards, aside from maybe having to go pick up a package from the UPS package depot. The hours are inconvenient for anyone who is on a 'normal' work schedule, and then there are the lines to wait in and the possibility of dealing with disgruntled or incompetent employees behind the counter. It is so inconvenient that sometimes I just let whatever it is sit there until it is returned to the sender, making it their problem to get the postage right. But usually I juggle the schedule around and make the trip down to the post office. I do try to make sure that I put enough postage on outgoing mail, even if it means I occasionally pay more than I absolutely have to. I wouldn't want to put anyone else through that pain.

The other day I came home from work and noticed that the flag on the mailbox was up. I figured my wife must have had a letter or something to send out, but when I went inside I found a padded mailer with a big red Postage Due stamp on it and the amount, $0.41, written in next to the stamp. Our local postal worker had delivered the mail and left us the little envelope to put our payment in. So the mailbox flag was up because my wife had put the $0.41 in the envelope for the mail carrier. As a small side note, I've gained the impression that mailers usually arrive postage due when people use regular stamps as postage as opposed to machine-printed labels or the printed-off postage from eBay or Stamps.com. Maybe it is because those other methods come with a better chance that the mailpiece has actually been on a scale once before being shipped.

I thought it was pretty cool of the postal worker to do that for us. We get pretty good service from the folks who service our local route, although sometimes an envelope that is a little too big for the mailbox gets shoved in there anyway, endangering the contents. But overall I think we've been pretty lucky with our mail service. We've never had a mail carrier drive up onto the lawn and toss our packages onto the front step:

Or toss the mail up the driveway from the safety of their vehicle. All in all, I'd say we're pretty lucky, although I guess it's pretty bad when just getting your mail in pretty good condition is considered an excellent end-state rather than the normal expectation.

Oh, and the cards I received in the mailer? They were a big stack of mostly 2012 Topps base that I needed for a set and traded for on Zistle. It was kind of annoying to have the cards arrive Postage Due, but I guess stuff like that happens from time to time. I'm not going to waste a bunch of my karma feeling angry about it, especially since my letter carrier saved me a trip to the post office.