More Progress

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A week or so ago I stopped at the post office and ask for a mail bag and an M mail label. M mail is a service of the post office whereby a person can send a number of books at a low rate to another country. I was told the minimum weight allowed was eleven pounds and the maximum weight was sixty-six pounds. I took the bag home and a few days later Nancy and I sorted through a collection of books selecting those we would ship to Prague. The winter evening will be long and as TV is not be of interest there should be lots of time for reading. I tied bundles of four or five books together and Nancy added a label on the first book giving our address in Prague. All set, no problem ... it had worked in 2000 when we sent two bags of books to Xi'an in China.

Wrong, there was a problem. I took the bag, now quite full of books, to the post office. The postal clerk peered into the bag, got a puzzled look on his face and walk to another clerk. They talked for a few minutes and he returned. "I can't send these," he said.

"Why?" I ask.

"The books are loose, they have to be put in boxes with a label on each box."

"Well," I said, "each bundle has a label."

"I see," he replied, "but they have to be in boxes."

"That is strange," I replied. "Four years ago we had the books in boxes and this same post office made us take them out and tie them as I have these. They said, 'How can we tell that you have only books in the boxes?' "

There is no point in even considering arguing with a government official as it is a total waste of time and emotions. So, I carried the forty or so pounds of books back to the car, drove home, boxes them up, labeled each box and drove back to the post office. This time ..... no problems.

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