We get letters from kids where I work, and reading them is an extremely gratifying part of my job. But it wasn’t the contents of a recent letter from a San Diego 6th-grader that caught my attention—it was the envelope itself.
“My, that’s an awfully large stamp,” I thought to myself. “Hmmm, stamps don’t usually have bar codes on them, do they?” And that’s when it clicked: It wasn’t a stamp at all; it was the self-adhesive label from a booklet of self-adhesive stamps.
Either this kid hasn’t been sufficiently schooled in proper postage, or the whippersnapper is getting an early jump on self-adhesively sticking it to The Man.
[Editor’s note: Salt in Wound does not condone mail fraud, even if this technique is very clever and sailed right past San Diego’s postal professionals.]
Jack Silbert, curator