Forever Due

Return to sender.

Last week, in a senior moment, I mailed in my final 2018 quarterly tax payment with one big omission. Yep, I forgot to stick on a Forever stamp (currently $.50 in postage), thus denying the letter a smooth flight to the IRS office in San Francisco. And now forever is due (see photo).

If there was any hope that this Very Important Letter would get delivered sans postage, that optimism was crushed yesterday when it was returned to my mailbox. Would the good people at the USPS, surely recognizing that our country is trillions of dollars in debt, make an exception that would benefit government far more than it would cost? I can assure you that my quarterly tax payment is many multiples of the price of a first class stamp.

The answer is NO. No exceptions. No stamp, no trip to San Francisco. That might be because the USPS is a self-funded agency—itself billions of dollars in debt—and sees no reason to make a tiny loan to me or to its brothers and sisters at the IRS. It’s tempting to blame a human for the journey-ending message that was rubber stamped onto my letter, but it was probably done by a robot. Whatever happened to Postage Due stamps?

The mailbox-to-mailbox trip took six days. I know that the letter made it as far as Tacoma. That’s postmarked on the envelope and is where all mail from the Kitsap peninsula is sorted and processed before continuing on to its final destination. What the letter did during the rest of the time will never be known. I doubt that it had a fun weekend.

While I was waiting out the letter’s six-day journey, I had time to question USPS counter clerks at post offices in Bremerton and Allyn on what might happen to it. Both correctly predicted that the letter would come back to me—eventually. One speculated that the letter might get as far as California while the other assured me that Tacoma would catch my mistake. While talking to the latter clerk, I purchased additional Forever stamps.

There was also time to check my online brokerage account to see if the check had been cashed. (I didn’t because continuing volatility in the stock market makes that too depressing.) While a long shot, the letter might have beaten the pay-to-play delivery system. But with the current government shutdown, is the IRS even processing checks? I would think they are. Taking in revenue, even during furloughs, seems essential to me.

Tomorrow the letter will start a second trip to San Francisco, this time with a Forever stamp affixed. Last night’s prime time speeches by Trump, Pelosi, and Schumer about the impasse over the border wall and government funding weren’t encouraging. At the rate their negotiations are going, my quarterly payment will be processed before the shutdown ends. That will at least answer one of the many questions about which government services are essential.