27B-Stroke-6
Last week the USPS decided to stop accepting “bound printed matter”. You are no longer allowed to buy postage for bound printed matter at the counter, nor are you permitted to apply postage yourself.
…except, you can submit it at the loading dock, if you’ve got a Postage Imprint Permit (which we do), and you can fill out a PS3605-R.
We would have known this, if only we’d read issue 22241 of the Postal Bulletin. Silly us!
So much of today was spent writing and testing a library that will programmatically fill out a PS3605-R pdf.
(It’s not as simple as it sounds – above and beyond figuring out where each of the 50 or so pieces of data go on several different pages, we also need to store the “bound printed matter” postal rate charts in the database, and round up weights to the nearest pound (except, there are also price points at 1.5, 2.5, and 3.5 pounds), and we need to print out one PS3605-R for each weight class we send, and within each weight class, we have to break the number of packages shipped down by number of postal zones crossed from source to destination…).
Six hours of my life, down the drain.
Ugh.
On the other hand, it’s now done, and we can leverage it to use Postage Imprints for more of our HeavyInk mail, which should speed up shipping a bit.
(subject line hattip)
November 18th, 2008 at 10:59 pm
Ducts don’t fix themselves, Trav. Central services will be open and able to serve you centrally between the hours of X and Y. This has not been a recording.
November 19th, 2008 at 12:11 am
I once prosecuted a small businessman for ripping the postal service off for about $75,000 in postage. His complex scheme? Bringing his bulk mail to the loading dock with the proper forms, and telling the postal workers there that he had paid for it. They never checked the forms.
He got away with it for a year. They only caught him because a disgruntled employee dimed him out.
November 19th, 2008 at 8:30 am
[quote comment="171835"]I once prosecuted a small businessman for ripping the postal service off for about $75,000 in postage. His complex scheme? Bringing his bulk mail to the loading dock with the proper forms, and telling the postal workers there that he had paid for it. They never checked the forms.
He got away with it for a year. They only caught him because a disgruntled employee dimed him out.[/quote]
I don’t understand how that worked for even a day. We’ve got a postage permit imprint, and we have to prefund that BEFORE we can drop the mail off.
Actually, hmmm….the form does have three spaces: postage already applied, total postage, and postage due. We specify $0 for “already applied”, and thus “total postage” == “postage due”. I suppose if you just changed the numbers around …
…but would not the postal workers notice that NONE of your mail had postage already applied?
Or maybe you put the permit imprint seal on the boxes, and then just say “yeah, but don’t charge my account” ?
Anyway, I’ve heard “it’s always the ex-wife, or the disgruntled employee who rats you out”.
Did this guy even have a defense? I’d think “please guilty, ask for mercy” would be the best strategy…
November 19th, 2008 at 10:09 am
[quote comment="171919"]…but would not the postal workers notice that NONE of your mail had postage already applied?[/quote]
I think you answered your own question here: they’re postal workers.
“They wouldn’t even lift a finger to save their own grandmothers from the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal without orders signed in triplicate, sent in, sent back, queried, lost, found, subjected to public inquiry, lost again, and finally buried in soft peat for three months and recycled as firelighters.”
I will say, though (mostly to keep from getting on his bad side) that my own letter carrier writes some pretty awesome poetry.
November 20th, 2008 at 4:04 am
Gee, with all that agravation to ship something, its wierd that the post office is losing money hand over fist..
Oh wait
It isn’t.