'
I gotta ask my facer-canceller repair guy, but my guess is that while they were fixing the machine and/or clearing a jam, the rest of that shift's mail was run thru other machines ... so they grabbed a handful of mail to run & re-run until they were satisfied that the machine was in good running order.
Nice find, especially with that nice, bright, cheery, festive yellow cover.
Cheers,
/s/ ikeyPikey
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"I collect stamps today precisely the way I collected stamps when I was ten years old."
Another possibility posted by a member of The Stamp Forum is that when postal employees in a sorting unit are under review they might run items through multiple times if they are concerned about possible manpower reductions due to decreased mail volume.
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"Just one more small collection, hun, really! LoL "
"... reporting that it might have happened and why ..."
I am going go GUESS that the Stamp Forum member was reading motives (never a best practice) into the minds of people s/he never met doing a job that s/he never did in a place that s/he has never been.
Moreover, to argue the difference on the merits, feeding an envelope thru a machine again & again to simply run the counter on the machine would not require that you invert & reverse the envelopes, again & again.
OTOH, testing the machine to see that there is a clear impression on every envelope would require that you invert & reverse the envelopes, again & again, so that you hit a fresh surface each time.
Cheers,
/s/ ikeyPikey
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"I collect stamps today precisely the way I collected stamps when I was ten years old."
That does make sense about using the cover for testing. Sounds very plausible. Also the ink is very heavy, perhaps they had run dry and were testing to make sure the cancels were legible and the inking even. All conjecture, but fun to try to puzzle it out.
I miss the old cancels! So much nicer than the sprays. Yeah I know the sprays don’t damage as many stamps and the new equipment speeds up processing, but I used to move my stamps over to the left to capture the CDS and try for a sock on the nose, Miss that!
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"Just one more small collection, hun, really! LoL "
- the sprays are an awful sort of damage, in that they are so often illegible & smudged ... and that's before you hit them with the Pure Citrus ... and
- the stamps are being torn more often than ever, but my GUESS is that the ever-more-automated processes are being run at ever-higher-speeds than the older systems.
Cheers,
/s/ ikeyPikey
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"I collect stamps today precisely the way I collected stamps when I was ten years old."
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