Among the things that give mail carriers nightmares, I imagine, are dogs, rain, snow and gabby residents who delay them on their appointed rounds. Now they can add a new fear — potatoes.
Yes, potatoes are legal to mail through the United States Postal Service. We’re talking potatoes without shipping boxes or bags. Just a spud with a message on one brown side and stamps and an address on another. Think of them as three-dimensional, earthen postcards.
At least two companies will handle the logistics for you. The first, Mail A Spud, charges $9.99 and estimates delivery in 10-15 days. The second, Potato Parcel, offers some unique options, including the Spooky Tater and a burlap-sack add-on, the latter of which destroys the thrill of receiving a solitary potato.
Of course, you can mail the potato yourself if you really want to. Mail A Spud notes that it costs about five bucks. Left unmentioned are the weird stares you will receive from clerks at the post office, but you do save half the cost of using a professional service.
I wanted to ask a real, live mail carrier to share an opinion about the possibility of hauling potatoes around with all those political advertisements, catalogs and centerfold-free subscription copies of Playboy, but since it meant taking a day off work and camping out under the mailbox, I decided against it.
I would guess, however, that after the novelty wore off — say, somewhere around delivery of the eighth or ninth potato — it would be just another annoying part of the job.
And, really, how much of a message can you fit on a potato? “I love you,” “I hate you,” or “I’m breaking up with you” is probably the extent of the deathless prose that can be legibly committed, especially when you take its uneven surface into account.
Additionally, there aren’t all that many potato jokes or puns that you could share. “You’re so a-peeling,” “my little hot potato,” “let’s mash it up,” “I’m rooting for you,” and maybe something about “speck-taters” are the only ones I can think of. None of which are as clever as “Orange you glad you met me,” but you can’t mail an orange.
And this potato uncertainty comes from somebody for whom the potato is a running joke. In my family, we often reference a report on Poland written by my daughter in grade school. In a desperate attempt to fill the space requirement, she shared at least half a dozen times that the potato is the country’s top export. Reading that report would make you think that the entire history of the world depended on the tiny tuber.
I could see myself sending my daughter a potato with a dig about Poland, and maybe mailing one to Dan Quayle where I misspelled it “potatoe,” but otherwise the long-term outlook for postal potatoes is rather limited.
Yams, on the other hand, seem much better suited to punning and post offices. Just as I was about to file a trademark on the service, I discovered Yammogram online.
Yep, you guessed it — they mail yams. And tins of Spam, sardines and Vienna sausage with messages written on the outside. That’s American ingenuity and capitalism at its finest.
I yam so unimpressed.
chris.schillig@yahoo.com
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