I bought some pretty note cards last week, with an ingraving of the UMass Chapel on the front, to use as thank-you cards to the folks who wrote letters and invitations in support of my Fulbright proposal. I got out the fountain pen that Phil got me as a gift, filled it with my fancy blue-black ink, and used my oak Levenger's writing desk to write out five letters and to address the envelopes. I felt very professorial taking my hand-written thank-you letters to the post office to mail.
I took the letters in and asked for some pretty stamps and to have them gently cancelled. The woman behind the counter threw a transparent binder at me with various kinds of stamps jammed willy-nilly in it. I indicated one kind and she said I would have to buy a whole sheet to use those, so I did. Then she threw the stamps at me and thrust the cancelling stamp at me to cancel them gently myself while she waited on another patron. It was hard to judge exactly where the edge of the stamp was -- it began between a quarter and a half inch from the outside of the device, so I ended up just barely touching the perforations on a couple of them until I figured out how it worked. The woman behind the counter was incensed when she saw them
"These aren't cancelled!" she snarled. "Someone could still use those!" The idea of a biology professor in Germany steaming off the self-adhesive US stamps and figuring out some way to use them again struck me as particularly bizarre, but I just mumbled an apology and left. She yelled after me to warn that the machine would cancel them again and thoroughly deface them. Oh, well. I tried.