Recently an idea struck me. Because I am curious whether or not they would send certain packages or envelopes under certain conditions, the United States Postal Service (USPS) needs some testing . My first test was this: Send an envelope with insufficient postage accompanied by a coin to make up for it.
I decided to start out small and work up to more outrageous tests. If you have any ideas on testing the USPS let me know, I will probably try it as long as it's not harmful or illegal, obviously.
- I place insufficient postage accompanied by a quarter. I taped the quarter in place of where the other stamp should have gone. I did not use a return address so that they could not send it back, even though they really are sending it back to me, they just don't know it! Then I wrote a note on the side explaining my circumstances.
The note under the postage says (after I took this photo I added "-thanks" at the end):
Sorry, I didn't have another stamp but had to send this before the mail was picked up. Here is the change for it.
- Just to be sure they did not grow suspicious, open the envelope and find nothing, I placed a piece of important documentation.
- I then sent the envelope off in one of those big blue mailboxes. To avoid any extra suspicion I sent it from another city, Fargo.
- Usually an envelope arrives at its destination within about three days, however, I did not expect to find this one. But I did. Here's the proof!
When I sent this envelope to myself I did not think it would succeed. In the case of it succeeding I pictured the quarter removed by a postal worker and a stamp in place of it. As you can see in this photo the quarter was left the envelope throughout its travels. The printing over the postage was scattered into a bunch of little specks because there was too much space between the paper and the printer.