# The USPS Weight Discrepancy: A Case Study in Institutional Gaslighting

Here’s the thing about the United States Postal Service: they have perfected the art of the three-pound mystery. Our hero walked into a contract post office with a package that weighed exactly what the scale at home said it weighed. The USPS scale disagreed by three pounds. Not two. Not 1.5. Three full pounds—the weight of, say, a large chicken or a small toddler or roughly 48 golf balls. The postal worker delivered this diagnosis with the confidence of someone who has never questioned their equipment once in their natural life.

This is where malicious compliance enters the chat like a speedrunner with a glitch route. Instead of arguing with a human who operates a scale that may or may not have been calibrated during the Clinton administration, our protagonist simply… accepted the new reality. Paid for three extra pounds of fictional mass. Sent the package. Then—and here’s where it gets clinical—filed a complaint with the postmaster general. The complaint arrived back at the local post office. The very post office they’d complained about. Not how that’s supposed to work, as one commenter noted with the energy of someone who read the organizational chart once and has never recovered.

What’s beautiful about this is the structural irony: a bureaucracy so labyrinthine that complaining to the top just loops you back to the bottom, like a video game with broken collision detection. One person called it a crime. Another asked how long compensation took—over two years, they casually mentioned, like USPS losing packages is just a subscription service nobody signed up for. The comment section couldn’t even fully agree on whether this was genius or felony-adjacent. Which, honestly, tracks.

The real malicious compliance? Playing by USPS rules so perfectly that the rules themselves become the punchline. You want me to pay for phantom weight? Done. You want to send my complaint back to the people I’m complaining about? Sure, I’ll wait. The postal service speedran its own credibility into the ground, and all this person did was hold the controller.