TAKEN BY SURPRISE AGAIN

ONCE again our local post office has run out of stamps.

If you want to post a letter they print out a cash slip and glue it to your envelope. This is the time of year when people all over the world are sending Christmas cards to friends and relatives.

For many, it’s the only time of year that we renew contact and exchange family news.

Many “First World” countries print special Christmas stamps to honour the season.

Part of the delight of receiving messages from friends far away is looking at the pretty stamps from other countries. Not only are friends connected at this time, but countries too. Except for South Africa.

Our Christmas cards arrive dressed as invoices or tax demands.

I wonder what philatelists in America or Britain think when they receive a South African letter with a cash slip attached. Can you stick a cash slip in your stamp album?

There are places, like Tristan da Cunha, that earn quite a lot of foreign money by selling their stamps. I am sure there’s some profit in selling a little rectangle of paper for R5 or more.

As usual with this strange country of ours, it’s a lack of planning. Everything takes us by surprise. It rains in winter, and suddenly there’s a spate of traffic accidents as drivers skid about on wet roads.

“Oh my goodness,” they say as they smack into lamp posts, “where did all the water come from?”

Christmas has been around for almost 2000 years and it happens, predictably, at the same time every year. And it still catches the post office completely by surprise.

“Oops! We seem to have run out of stamps. I wonder why there’s a sudden demand for them. Strange, that. There was a similar rush on stamps around this time last year.”

Maybe the standing committee on finance in Parliament should allocate enough money to buy a calendar for the office of the chief executive of the post office, and mark the page for November in big red letters: “Print Stamps for Christmas.”

I don’t know why postage stamps should be such a problem.

Presumably there’s a company somewhere that produces stamps for us, and one would imagine they still have the printing plates they used for the previous batch.

Would it be too much to expect the printer to press the “Start” button and roll out a new batch?

Or did they already do that and are expecting SAA to deliver them?

Last Laugh

An elderly patient went to his doctor and complained that he kept hearing voices and they were driving him crazy.

The doctor prescribed some medicine and told the patient to come back in a week.

A week later the patient returned, looking very worried.

“Are you still hearing those voices?” The doctor asked. “No, they’ve stopped.” “We’ll, that’s good isn’t it?”

“Not really. I think I may be going deaf.”