[CQ-Contest] Redeeming IRCs - a short story and some tips

[(K7ZO) Scott Tuthill]

Having spent 40 minutes this morning at our main Post Office redeeming 35 
IRCs I thought I would pass on a few tidbits and hints to make this process 
potentially easier for those among you that will attempt the same thing 
before the end of the year and the current series expires.

I don't get down to the post office that often but I have noticed over the 
last couple of years that all of the old guard has retired. The last time I 
redeemed IRCs I went to the counter with the most experienced looking guy 
and it went very smooth. He knew what they were and said "This is going to 
take a long time, I know what they are, here are your stamps, I will process 
these later when the lines for the counter go away". The experience this 
time was quite different.

The guy at the counter had never heard of nor seen IRCs. He went to get his 
supervisor and then sent me over to an unused counter to wait for her. After 
about 10 minutes she came out and she brought with her the overall office 
manager. She had heard of them and had seen them but had never processed a 
redemption. She also thought the post office still sold them as "... we have 
these on the shelf in our vault...". The office manager had some vague 
recollection of them but was not really sure what to do with them either. 
The good thing was they knew they were good for an air mail stamp, or to be 
grammatically correct, they are now called "Global Forever" stamps.

I then watched them for 25 minutes try to figure out how to process the 
redemption transaction on their counter terminal. The office manager 
eventually had to call their main tech support line to get walked through 
it. [BTW - though I had printed out from their web site Section 381 on 
International Reply Coupons, this really does not help as the problem they 
had was with using their computer system.] Where they got hung up, and this 
is a tip to all in case you run into this is somewhere in the redemption 
process the system asks for "Sale by item number". My team was entering the 
IRC item number when they should have been using the Air Mail stamp item 
number, which is 578800.

The second tip has to do with US issued IRCs. In my pile of 35 I had a 
couple that were issued in the US. These are actually redeemed differently 
than the internationally issued ones which I didn't know until this morning 
when the folks at the counter had to sort out the two different redemption 
processes on their screen. Things were rather confusing at this point but I 
think I somehow received postage credit of $2.27 each for my two US issued 
IRCs. According to Section 381.2b of the postal regulations I think the 
amount should have been $2.09 but who knows. They just were doing what the 
terminal told them to do.

Anyway hope this note can save some of you out there several precious 
minutes in your next trip to the post office to redeem IRCs.

Scott/K7ZO