During my recent trip to Italy, I mailed myself some postcards. This one arrived from Rome. It took 23 days to get here.

On a couple of occasions I have stopped police officers and pointed out their fault – in a friendly way, of course. Usually I let them off with just a warning.

Well, a while back the fire department was getting lunch and parked their big fire truck in the regular parking area. It took up several spaces, of course, but I thought it was amusing how the fire department didn’t even park in the fire lane. I really wanted a picture of that.

Anyway, today I got a picture of the fire truck parked in the regular parking. It completely made my day. It was getting ready to pull away when I saw it, but I quickly ran up to it and asked if they would wait a minute for me to get my camera. They were amused and suggested making a “parking ticket” for police cars.

Over the weekend I bought a stamp in a post office vending machine. The machine ran out of change and printed a neat little receipt that said to take it to the desk and get a refund. The lost amount was printed on it. While ordinarily I would find it annoying for a vending machine to take my money, I did think it was really good design for the machine to be self-equipped to handle the situation.

Today, when I went to the post office to cash it in, the clerk told me I had to fill out a form stating who I was, where I lived, and how they money became lost. I protested by asking “do I really need to identify myself on this form in order to get my money back?”

“Yes,” she replied. “And you have to show identification.”

Personally, I don’t get it. The credit receipt says that the machine recorded the loss. They can easily check that record to see the receipt is legit, so I don’t think fraud is a real problem with this. So, what’s the deal? I doubt someone is going to fly a stamp into a building.

Anyway, not wanting to hold up the line, I just stated that the requirement was unacceptable to me and that she should just give me the receipt back.

But the story gets even better. I called the post office hot-line (the number is (800) 275-8777, in case you were wondering) and I was told that there is no postal regulation that required them to ask for ID. “Some post offices do and some post offices don’t” was the reply. She offered to connect me to my post office, but I know that they were already closed.

Hmm. I’ll have to think about how to respond to this one.

Well, the interface seemed a little clunky and I apparently didn’t get some of the reverse-Turing tests right because I had to re-enter several times, but it did finally work. I’ll let you know what the results are if I get an answer back. I bid $5.00 for it.

The fun part, however, is that my bank called me to make sure the transaction was legit. My bank has NEVER called me to make sure a transaction is good, even though I spend over $20,000 a year on my card. I make lots of Internet transactions and quite a few foreign ones as well. It seems odd that a $5.50 charge (there is a $0.50 transaction/profit fee to Google) would trigger an alert worthy of calling me.

I asked the rep what might have flagged the transaction and he told me “there has been a lot of on-line fraud associated with the ‘Google Answers’ merchant account.” I wonder if that means that there is an issue with Google, or if some bad people are exploiting Google’s service to test credit cards for validity.

It was also interesting that the rep from the bank readily proved to me that they were from the bank. They didn’t ask me any questions other than “Is this David Lightman” and “Did you authorize a charge from Google Answers about 15 minutes ago?”