Wedding Blog
The invites are stamped, most of the addresses are in, and thankfully, we are ready to mail. Well, most of them. A few will be given by hand, as the guests are moving or the addresses are unknown, things like that. After work today (I get out early- yay for Labor Day!), I’m going to go home, pick up my box of invitations and head to the local post office.
Lately I seem to have a grudge for all post offices. At the office we have a fantastic mail person, all mail is usually in by 11am, sometimes even hand delivered. When he is on vacation, or takes a day off, we have the most horrible mail delivery person imaginable. Mail doesn’t come in until four, and mostly it’s not even delivered correctly. Take the instance with my return stamp: I came to work at 7am, checking the online tracking for the stamp I’ve been waiting for. Boy, was I surprised to see “Notice Left” at 5:32pm the previous day. First of all, there was no notice. Second of all, we’re an office building that closes at 5pm, and she knows this. Mail is supposed to be delivered by 5pm to businesses in our ‘hood.
Anyway… I call the post office to ask about this, and “Kathy” puts me on hold as she looks up our address. Twelve minutes later, I hang up and call back. I tell Kathy that I was on hold for twelve minutes and wanted to know what was up with my package. After telling me that I should “expect” to always be on hold for 10-15 minutes every time I call, she says she has to call the carrier and she’ll call me back. Cutting to the chase, the stamp came in with our regular mail guy, and crisis was averted. 
After spending so many nights on these invitations, all I want to do is drop the box off at the post office. It’s a small neighborhood post office, the lines should be short, unless I want to do hand canceling. Do I really want to do that?
On mygatsby.com, it says this about hand canceling: The U.S. Post Office is happy to handle requests for hand canceling. This helps to ensure that large, thick, or oddly sized envelopes don’t get caught in processing machines. It can also minimize the amount of automated printing (for example, bar codes) the post office adds to your mailing address.
A fun thing to consider if you have plenty of time is to choose a city with a wedding-related name (Bridal Veil Falls, Oregon or Loveland, Colorado) and contact the postmaster about hand-canceling your invitations there. If you bundle your invitations together in a large package and mail them to the postmaster, she or he will arrange to hand-cancel your invitations.Hm, yeah, don’t really feel like doing all that for the assurance the invites won’t get messed up. A lot of people I talked to had theirs get mangled anyway, despite the trial of hand canceling. Many people don’t get the “happy to hand cancel” post office workers, and judging from the attitude I got when I was trying to ship out a wedding band, they’re not too happy to help with a lot (at least one specific post office I go to).To help me decide: are you going to hand cancel? If you already have, what is your advice, or opinion? Our invitations are the normal size, not abnormally thick, nor odd shaped, they are a good thickness and seemingly easy to mail.
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hahah, “happy to hand cancel”… yes, those are few and far between. i sent out boxed invites, so they had to be hand cancelled anyway. didn’t really have a choice. but the post office i went to did not have that feature at their site. it had to be done elsewhere, so it wasn’t oneof those experiences where they handed me the stamp and i stamped away. they just took my boxes and i left.
i don’t know why brides think it would be a good idea to mail a bundle of invites to Bridal Veil Falls, OR to have them hand-canceled. That’s taking things to a sick level.
can you imagine working at the post office (crazy hectic job) and then getting mail from goobers across the country wanting you to hand cancel their 100 wedding invitations!? mygatsby is dreaming.
im sorry but that makes me crazy. im sure thats why people go postal.
i said ‘hand cancel’ to my post lady and the blood went out of her face. she said i could do it myself.
so i did!
We were waiting in line to go to the counter when a happy PO worker came out from behind the wall and asked if we needed our invites hand canceled. Excitedly, I handed the box over, priding myself on how easy it all was. Two days later, I saw my parents’ invitation…MACHINE CANCELED! I was duped by my local PO. Be warned…
After many years of living abroad I can honestly say that I appreciate very much the great postal system we have. I don’t plan on hand cancelling…it’s just not that important to spend time on. Especially since only brides notice and everyone else throws it in the trash. One less thing to worry about.
When the new postal rates went into effect in May, they also changed their policies/attitude about hand canceling. Some POs now flat-out refuse to take hand canceled items while others charge an extra fee to do so. That said, I’m still hearing that some are still accepting HC items with no problems so I guess it depends where you go and who ya get at the counter.
If you want hand canceling to avoid the invitations going through machinery just be aware that even though the outgoing post office may hand cancel them, the various sorting facilities on the way to the invitations’ final destinations will still put the envelopes through the automated machinery.
Unless you have an oddly shaped or boxed invite, I kind of think it’s a waste of time to hand cancel them. Honestly, it’s a piece of mail - I think it looks more like mail if it has typical mail markings on it!! The purpose of the envelope is the protect what is held within, so frankly I could care less if the envelope isn’t all gorgeous by the time it arrives as long as the invitation inside is fine. Everyone’s just going to throw out the envelope anyway.
My husband and I took advantage of my mom’s address and mailed our save-the-dates on Valentine’s Day from Loveland, Ohio. We did ask for them (and our invitations) to be hand canceled - it looked very cute.
I hate the post office. No offense to anyone who works for them or has friends/family who do. I do personally like many of the postal employees I’ve encountered. It’s just that my previous job involved my knowing postal code backwards and forwards, and it’s all just insanity. The final straw was when I attended a “postal education” seminar and I knew more than the postal employee giving it, and she then confessed, “not very many of our employees are familiar with those rules.” Um, so if you don’t know the rules, how are you enforcing them, and why do I have to follow them like my life depends on it? Gaghh!
Anyway, I *did* ask for handcanceling (the staffer wasn’t thrilled; apparently I was in the “wrong” line, but she still huffily accepted my envelopes), but in retrospect, it was pretty pointless. The envelopes do end up getting sorted by machine.
Here’s the deal: the only way your envelopes will not touch a machine is if they are “non-machinable” (look it up at http://pe.usps.gov) and actually CAN’T make it through. You will have to pay extra postage in this case (it’s currently a 17 cent surcharge). Someone mentioned an extra fee for hand canceling - they can’t do that, but if the piece is non-machinable or outside the standard envelope dimensions or aspect ratio (like square envelopes), they do assess a fee.
I would strongly suggest, though, that you take your precious babies INSIDE and hand them to a worker. It’s no guarantee, but at least then you know you have transferred them over to a real person. At work, we once dropped 100s of event invitations into the drop box outside the PO…and got irritated calls a week later from clients who asked why their co-worker, etc. got invited to the party and they didn’t…turned out the invites never got to them. And I’m not talking 1 or 2…a lot. Why? No idea to this day. Also, I’ve walked by the mail carriers collecting from the street boxes…they leave the mail in the bins sitting on the street while they futz with stuff in the truck, and I’ve even seen a stray Netflix envelope left behind in the plastic tub under the drop box.
Sorry for the lengthy post…I just have some particularly strong opinions and more interaction than the “average bear” with the USPS.
Gak. WeddingBee ate my post! Again! It was really long, so I give up. Here’s the abridged recap minus my anecdotal reasons for these points:
1) USPS drives me nuts.
2) In some cases, your mailpiece physically can’t make it thru their machines; there’s a 17 cent surcharge in that case. Otherwise, at some point, they will, in all likelihood, suffer the indignity of being crammed in a sorting machine somewhere.
3) Check out http://pe.usps.gov for the guidelines. Not even the postal clerks know all this stuff (that in particular makes me nuts).
4) Spend the extra time to go into the PO to hand off your precious invites to a clerk, even if you don’t ask for hand cancelling; the street drop boxes (even in front of the PO) are a little sketch. (I don’t even like to drop my bills into those.)
5) Courtesy of my previous job, I have far too much USPS knowledge stuffed in my head. I can’t get rid of it, so I bequeath it to others. =)
i’m suddenly realizing why my dad comes home from work so uppity. he works for usps. lol.
Tea — ha ha! That’s awesome. I really do like many of the postal employees I’ve encountered. I can say for sure that there have been some true nutters on the other side of the counter (meaning customers) as well.
I took my invitations to a really quiet post office about 10 mins from my apartment this morning. It was worth the little drive because no one was in there (as usual) and I asked the clerk if I could hand cancel my invites. She said SURE and handed over two stamps and my mom and I stamped away! YAY for the PO in Verona, NJ!! My advice, go to a really small PO at an off-peak time.
I have called a dozen post offices in the LA area (Santa Monica, Beverly Hills, Century City) and none of them will hand cancel or allow me to do it myself.
They told me that no post office will allow this anymore, and since May when the postage went up, they no longer allow any hand cancelling, whether I am willing to do it myself or not.
Good luck everyone - I can’t be bothered with the stress of losing any, so I’m just going to mail them the regular way.
A month ago I’d never heard of hand cancelling before, so I wish I’d never known, because I was so looking forward to doing this, but not worth melting down over!
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Mrs. Kiwi, Los Angeles
Age and Occupation in 06: 27, Bookkeeper
Fiance's Age and Occupation: 27, P.E. Teach/Coach @ private schools in LA
Engagement Date: March 31, 2006
Wedding Date: November 3, 2007
Venue: Radisson Hotel
About Me: I'm a bookkeeper who failed high school algebra. I'm currently living in Los Angeles, literally a street over from where I grew up with Mr. Kiwi, my honey of three years. We have a jumbo mini-dachshund (seriously, he's huuuuge), and we're planning an autumn themed wedding on a shoestring, paid for by ourselves. The wedding date is my late grandma's birthday, I needed her there somehow, and that seemed like the best way for us. I can't believe I'm a Bee! I couldn't be more proud!
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