With almost four hundred Christmas cards to mail out this year, Peter made the trip last week to go and purchase some stamps. In Canada, if you go to a post office, or even Business Depot, you can purchase rolls of stamps in lots of one hundred. To ensure that we wouldn’t have any problems, we decided that Peter should go to the larger Itoman post office rather than the one closer to our apartment.
When he got there and asked for four hundred stamps, the lady at the post office didn’t seem to comprehend the enormity of his request. Eventually, when she understood, she started digging around and came up with about twenty.
She asked if it would be okay to combine 80 and 30 Yen stamps (the total price for international mailing is 110 Yen), which Peter said would be fine. They still didn’t have enough, so they sent a runner to another post office to pick up some more.
By this time, Peter was feeling quite badly for causing so much trouble, but didn’t have the vocabulary to say, “It’s alright. I’ll take what you’ve got and go to another post office.” At one point he had every person on the post office staff working to help him. When they finally had all of the stamps, the staff triple-counted, to make sure that everything was in order. What service!
Forty-five minutes later, Peter walked out victorious… and single-handedly responsible for any stamp shortages that day!
