One of my brother's friends, for some reason, had me join his "stamp collecting" group on Facebook. I am still not quite sure if his supposed love for stamps is a joke or not. That's where all the trouble started...Just kidding, there really isn't much trouble in this story--I just thought that'd add a little drama. But I shall continue:
So then some "person" on Facebook called Stamps Int friended me. That, I believe, caused me to be friended by an individual in India whose name I will not mention for his (or her) protection. This person left a message when they friended me, which went something like:
Hello,
It is always very nice to meet a fellow collector. I am a stamp enthusiast, and would love to learn from you about what kind of stamps there are in your country, and how it is to be a collector there.
My natural instinct is to, in pure Brando fashion, immerse myself in the role of the stamp collector, and see how far I can take it before making my first enemy on the Indian subcontinent. But I don't know much about stamps, and I'm not sure I can fake it. Here is the complete list of information I can offer this Indian person:
- First-class postage for a normal-sized letter is 42 cents.
- Stamps in the United States often have pictures of dead presidents, Elvis, or Neil Armstrong on the Moon on them. Or kitties!
- When there are wavy lines on a stamp, that means it has been used to mail something. The postal service puts these wavy lines on stamps so that they cannot be used twice. I also believe that a stamp without the wavy lines is worth more than one with wavy lines to stamp collectors.
- If a stamp is stuck to an envelope, you can remove it with steam. I would probably use a tea kettle. Tea kettles are fun because they are a good excuse to try out your annoying English accent. Just yell "Put the kettle on, love!" at someone.
- There are 42 cent stamps, 2 cent stamps (only really old people have these), and "forever" stamps, which you can either use to mail things forever (hence the name), or as a really silly investment, since they only cost, like 48 cents or something, so if you hold onto them for 15 years, the postage will probably be 60 cents, and you'll have saved yourself 12 cents per stamp. Glorious.
Yea, so I'm pretty much running out of things I know. I don't really think I'll fool this Indian person, but I'll try. I wonder what someone thinks when someone else tries to trick that person in to thinking he/she is a stamp collector. It's not quite normal.
If you have more things I can tell my new Indian friend, let me know in the comments!
3 comments:
In the near-recent past I had in my possession a plethora of two-cent stamps. This was due to the fact that I had overstocked on thirty-nine cent stamps and had no desire to send a letter until the price of stamps had inflated by two cents! In just several months. The two-cent stamps had an interesting graphic of some sort of ring on them. By interesting I mean bad, it may have been a diamond or a pearl ring. The point of this comment is that I do not consider myself an "old lady." I am in fact female, and in comparison to some I may be old, if the some are seven or so- but I do not wear pantyhose or dentures. Nor do I fart when I walk up the stairs. That being said, don't make gross generalizations about two-cent-stamp-owners.
Just because you said this, I'm going to generalize about 2-cent stamp owners in every post I make for the next month. And I will make generalizations that have no bearing on reality or common sense.
I'm pretty sure they have the Internet in India, and he can access the USPS site and look at stamps all day.
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