In preparing to move, I had to ship several kilos of Crap That I Have Accrued® to the United States. I just sent three packages, totaling 16kg.

Thanks to the retarded, but (as of last week) completely private, German postal monopoly, it cost me 106€.

Even worse, the Deutsche Post uses a bizarre per-package payment system, which means that if I had spent 2,30€ on a box, I could have put the contents of my two smaller packages into one bigger package, saving me a cool 29,70€. But they did not tell me this until after they had already sent both of the packages behind the Very German Line of No Fucking Return. (It's a yellow line, which always indicates something powerful/dangerous/final here.)

Holy crap, this makes me want to vote FDP in September. It's all well and good to protect the people against the tyranny of the market, but this is a perfect instance of Europe needing to loosen up the reigns on business and encourage some healthy competition.

After all, when was the last time anybody thought:

*Sigh* Paying low prices for shipping goods is simply not worth the oppression I suffer at the hands of Federal Express, UPS, and the Postal Service.