Went to the post office the other day to send a large letter to the US. The poor post office worker had to literally fill up the entire envelope with stamps, about 15 of them. Each and every stamp had to be dampened, and sometimes he had problems making them stick.
I mentioned the US stamps, which you don’t have to dampen, and how useful they’d be in this situation. You just peel them off, and they have normal adhesive on the other side. Sort of like scotch tape. His reply? “I don’t really consider those to be stamps.”
Why the hell not? Stamps serve a single purpose in life: To document to the postal company that you’ve paid for their services. Sure, it’s okay if they look nice, too, and all that. But they’re there because they serve a function. So whatever innovations we can come up with that improves the functionality of the stamps are good innovations. Stamps that stick without a lick is a good thing.
The reason that I bring this up is obviously not that I think that the adhesive used on stamps is all that important. It’s because of the attitude of the postal worker. This attitude is what makes Denmark such a painful place to be at times. We have a terrible angst for anything new. The Euro and the EU, for instance. It makes perfect sense for a country like Denmark to be part of that. We’re too small for our currency and our foreign policy to really matter. But if we team up with the rest of the Europeans, we can make a difference.
Foreign people is another. As is our welfare system. “But we have the best welfare system in the world, we are a role model for the rest of the world.” Yeah, right. This whole notion that we’re the best country in the world, and all the rest of the world are envious of us, is all baloney, something we savagely want to believe, so we don’t have to face the question: Could it be us that have it wrong?
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