I hope you are doing well, today, I had my own experience at the Post Office, and I'd like to share it with you.
As I often tell my brides to have their wedding invitations Hand Canceled by the post office – and having my own experience having things hand canceled, I know it can be an ordeal. But I think that every once in a while you must experience things for yourself to get the full familiarity.
Now, I know what Hand Canceling is, I really do. Instead of being put through a machine, it’s hand stamped, as to avoid damaging what is inside an overtly large or strangely shaped shipping object. However, we suggest Hand Canceling your wedding invitation so that they don’t go through that evil machine.
So, when it came time to mail invitations of my own that I knew needed to have a lot of TLC, I opted to bring all 200 of them to my nice post office man, and ask for them to be all Hand Canceled. He was nice enough, he re-weighed and measured all of them, and explained that I had the correct amount of postage on them, he boxed them up and off they went. He mentioned that they needed to be sent to our main post office to be hand canceled, they don't do that at their branch.
Imagine my surprise when the next day I received an invitation back in the mail. This invitation was not even addressed to me, it was addressed to someone else, and it was shipped to the return address. NICE! But as if that wasn’t nice enough, it wasn’t HAND CANCELED! It had those lovely squiggly lines and a beautiful Bar Code on the bottom.
I then returned to the post office with a few more invitations that needed to be shipped off, and the invitation that I had received back. The same man helped me, I expressed, very politely my disappointment, and asked where the confusion had originated. He explained that that was indeed Hand Canceled – sure it was!
But what I wanted was a Circle Date Stamp. (my question was, really, is that the technically name for it…) But I was polite enough back, and kindly thanked him for his help. And he picked up the stamp and showed me a date stamp in the shape of a circle.
When I left, I called Kristin and said, fairly loud, I might add – CIRCLE DATE STAMP! Really! Circle Date Stamp! I am sure in the book of USPS information, in the back there is a specific category called The Circle Date Stamp!
So from now on, when asking your PostMaster’s office for a Hand Canceled item you might want to be more specific and ask for a Circle Date Stamp. Sheesh!
Happy Planning,
Melissa
{Picture of the Official Circle Date Stamp}
