My invitations went out 3 days ago, and our experience with the post offices in Wellesley and Framingham have been AWFUL. To begin with, when I went to hand-cancel my Save the Dates earlier this year in Wellesley, the woman behind the counter went completely nuts, and began yelling at me not to get married, telling me I was ruining my life, etc. Everyone was staring at me as she went on and on, and even though I started out excited, I felt pretty humiliated and totally down by the time I left.
This post office opens earlier than most, so my mom took our invitations there to hand-cancel them this past week. They gave her a hard time, and wouldn't let her do it, so she took the invitations and went to a post office in Framingham. I spent hours designing a special invitation with the woman we were working with, and decided early on to pay extra for very special calligraphy that went nicely with our invite. After hand-canceling every one of our 160 invitations, the post office accidentally put them through the machine anyway, and all of the calligraphy got covered by huge black lines. Some of our guests couldn't read their own addresses by the time they got them! I know it's a silly thing to get so upset about, but we put so much time, effort, and money into our invites, and it was one of the things we were most happy with. My dad made copies of some of our neighbors ruined envelopes, and went to the post office to ask what happened, and predictably they were very rude to him. Not that we're expecting much, but it's been disappointing to deal with so many rude people and to have them make such a huge mistake. Oh, well. At least the invitations themselves made it in one piece!! :-)