Bad Post Office Karma?

I wanted to share a post office story from last week. After recently blasting the post office for it's poor, overpriced, and inefficient service, I was pretty excited to send out a package using the automated postal center (the only innovation from the post office in the last...oh...two decades, "Forever Stamps" notwithstanding). After all, this new technology allows me to avoid the almost-guaranteed lines of ten or more people, as well as having to watch the counter employees work in slow motion and there weren't really a bunch of people waiting in line for service. In short, I could print out postage for my package and drop it in a box, and be out of there in two minutes or less.

When I walked up to the machine, it asked me to insert my credit card. I honestly thought this was an odd way to begin a transaction, but it had been a while since I last used it, so I figured the interface might've changed a bit. After inserting my card, though, six books of stamps appeared in the dispenser, and my credit card was charged more than $40. Oops. (Side note: For some unknown reason, stamps out of the machine come in books of 18, whereas they come in books of 20 from real people. More on this later...). I half-noticed when I walked in that some boy was playing at the machine before I used it, and he must've dialed up an order for these stamps and left the machine with the screen asking for a credit card. Just my luck.

By this point, I was livid, since I would now have to not only wait in the line, I would have to convince an incompetent postal worker to give me my money back, since 108 stamps is more than I use in about ten years (and hopefully, by then, the Post Office as we know it will have dissolved). Sure enough, it took about 15 minutes to reach the front of the line (by this point I'm about 20 minutes late for work), and naturally, the post office guy was unable to help me. Among the excuses I got: "We don't even stock books of 18" and "The supervisor is on vacation this week, and nobody here is authorized to...". I believe he ended this with "provide decent customer service" but I'm not totally sure. As I said, I was livid. I protested in vain, made a minor scene to let the other people standing in the line know that I was about to be hawking stamps (the first time the line actually worked in my favor), and began doing what the post office guy couldn't do for me -- sell the stamps I didn't want. Fortunately, it took me only two or three minutes to get rid of all of them, thanks to some extremely understanding (or naive, since, after all, they were waiting in line to buy stamps rather than using the machine), older folks. I walked out of the dreaded post office, nearly half an hour late to work, with an odd feeling of triumph. Maybe I should write the Postmaster General to explain the shortcomings of the USPS? Nah, it's not like it would actually accomplish anything.