Philately

Yesterday I went to the National Postal Museum, which I was admittedly a little dubious about prior to going. On the other hand, I didn't know a lot about stamps or the postal service before yesterday so I was bound to learn something! My knowledge was limited to waiting in line at the lost post office behind several people with extraordinarily complex postal arrangements.

Parenthetically, this is something that has always been a little baffling to me. I don't generally mind waiting in a queue, it's generally the respectful, orderly thing to do, but it becomes more aggravating than necessary when the people ahead of you aren't quite as organized as it seems like they could be, thereby slowing everything down. I might be missing something, and I don't mean to offend, but the postal service has always seemed relatively straight-forward to me: bring something to mail, decide on the amount of time you want it to spend trekking to its destination, pay appropriate postage (and insurance, if necessary). Maybe my postage needs are just of the very basic variety and there are a whole host of other services of which I am not aware? I don’t know.

Anyway, back to the museum. It was really cool, I thought. It quickly became evident that I have taken the U.S. Postal Service for granted. Really stop and think about how brilliant a system it is: you put a sticker on an envelope, put it in the mailbox and magically it shows up at someone else’s house/business a couple days later. A couple DAYS later! Seriously, the only way it could get there faster is if you physically hand delivered the letter and who has time to do that. Moreover, if you were going to hand deliver the letter, wouldn’t that undermine the whole idea? Why not just talk to the person instead of handing them a letter and walking away if you travelled all that way? Okay, so that was one thing I gained an appreciation for. Another is the bigger-picture concept that a highly functional postal service really helped develop our country. Up until very recently, mail was how long distance business was done (and a lot of local business as well). Also, did you know that the postal service was largely responsible for the advent of commercial airlines? I didn’t. Think about it though, if you have scheduled planes flying mail from place to place, it’s only a matter of time before someone wants to ride along instead of just sending mail.

Okay, and then there were the stamps. I admit that I never really gave stamps all that much thought before, other than maybe pausing to admire a particularly nice work of stamp art or note how a foreign stamp differs from a U.S. one.  Well, I learned there is so much more to stamps than just being pretty stickers. I could go into detail here, but that would ruin the surprise for when you go see the exhibits yourself. I could probably spend hours in the stamp collection though, they have stamps from literally everywhere in the world. And a lot of them are less boring than most of the U.S. ones.