Tuesday 8 March 2005

Pic of the day: Some things remain the same. Or at least it may seem that way. (Screenshot from the anime Hikaru no Go, although neither Hikaru nor Go is visible in this picture.)

Postage stamps

This actually happened a few days ago, but I suddenly remembered to preserve it for posterity. I had got the phone and ADSL bill from Telenor, and as expected they had not made any correction for the 14 days I was without connection in late December and early January. So before the bill was due, I wrote a polite letter, printed it out, signed it and sent it to them by mail. Paper mail.

There is a reason for this. Studies have shown that people take paper mail more seriously than e-mail. They tend to archive paper mail, but often forget to archive e-mail. I am not sure if this is due to the common practice of receiving and sending lots of personal e-mail at work. You don't see many people sitting in their office or cubicle and writing handwritten letters, though I suppose it can happen when the love is strong enough. But anyway, facts are facts. And I wanted them to have my letter in their archives when this case came before the court.

I had no idea what a letter within Norway cost. Last fall I sent a letter to America, to a friend there, so I remember that. I have no idea when I last sent a letter anywhere else. Probably a few years, and probably another such occasion as this.

My brother and his wife, may they both live to see their grandchildren happily married, have made a kind of tradition of sending a letter to friends and relatives for Christmas. The letter is rather obviously mass produced by printing it from a computer, complete with pictures. They then put it in a an envelope and pay almost a dollar to have it sent here, complete with fuzzy picture printout and all, when they could have mailed it directly here in an instant for virtually free, with no degradation of picture quality. I bet this is the wife's idea, she is human on both sides of her family. (But a very nice human, by choice.)

It takes more for me, obviously. But anyway, I had not needed to worry about knowing the price. When I came to the post office, there was an vending machine on the right. Here I could choose from a menu on a small screen. It was not very intuitive, I actually bought two instead of one because I did not see it register my first choice. In all fairness, I could have gone back and fixed it, but I expected to send more letters to Telenor, as I assumed they were either too greedy or too incompetent (if not both) to react to my first letter.

Anyway, when I had finished choosing, and put on coins (kr 6, or nearly $1, is the minimum), the machine printed the stamps. In full color. They were self-gluing but resting on waxed paper. When I was young, you had to lick stamps to make them stick to the paper. Yay for progress! The funny thing, it is progress within an obsolete field. If not for the ossified minds of the older generation, there would be no need for these things in the first place. Or perhaps they keep it up because of the collectors. Evidently some people buy used stamps, and even for more than the nominal value. I suppose they won't ever do that with e-mails.

I guess I am a borderline case of "elderly" myself. I enjoy getting a handwritten letter. Not regularly, I'd prefer e-mail for that (but even those are rare) but once or twice to see your handwriting, your choice of paper and ink. But not computer printouts. To me that means "I don't like you (thus no handwriting) and I don't trust you with the delete key (thus the snailmail)". It is an implied insult.

P.S.

Incidentally, while I wrote all this, the reply from Telenor was in the mail. It is a computer printout, indeed. But it also refunds me the half month I lost, exactly in accordance with my demand.

What can you do when you can't even trust a former monopoly to be greedy and stupid? What is the world coming to?