I had a great time at the Post Office the other day. (No, it’s not a slow day at the commentary department – I really had a great time!) I had expected nothing less than a hassle, since of all days, this was tax-filing day, which meant everyone and their uncle had to make sure their tax returns were posted with the right date.

Here I was with all sorts of stuffed envelopes and small packages to mail, and I was braced to simply buy a book of stamps from the machine and just be overly generous with them.

Then I walked through the door and came to a halt … where was the crowd? I’ve been going to this post office for years, and I’m totally familiar with how the line backs up around the big counter, and then out into the lobby and finally down the hall.

On tax day, you might even find a postal worker or two standing out on the curb, ready to take your envelope. But this line only curved around the counter and barely touched the lobby, typical of a slow day. Still wondering, I spied the automated station down the hall – all alone and lonely.

I plopped down all my assorted items, fished out my credit card and set to work.

Being new to the system, I had to read the screen intently, and made several wrong turns, but ended up with customized stamp labels (and customized prices) for everything. For the first time ever, I actually could see all the options I had for delivery and could choose the service and the fee. And these labels could clearly be read by machine as well, all along the way.

Sure, I exited once unexpectedly, but I pretty quickly got the hang of it. And as a finishing flourish, I bought a small sheet of self-stick stamps, and hit ‘done.’ A fellow walked up just then, obviously intending to use the machine, so I picked up my packets and their labels and moved to the table nearby.

“Excuse me,” I hear, “You have to exit out of this. You don’t want me to be charging my stamps to your credit card.”

Sure enough, there was another exit screen to navigate, but this was a tiny defeat in an otherwise triumphant experience.

A statistic I’d read earlier in the day sprang to mind. The IRS website expected over three million hits that day. Could the April 15th tradition of America be changing?

How many years had I made that annual mad dash downtown to the Federal Office building? I’d fight to park, follow the crowd to the rows of paper booklets, and grab all the forms on my list. Trees fell by the forest-full, but who needed to go downtown these days? The forms are on the website or automatically within my tax program. I fill them out on my computer, and everything is neat and orderly.

It’s taken a whole lot of technology working together, but could the convergence of it all be finally upon us? Has the personal tax landscape of America finally and inalterably changed?

There I was, in absolute delight, finishing up my assembly line of affixing the right label to the right package. And I hear behind me, “Oh, no! I need a book of postcard stamps, and this machine doesn’t do those! Now I’ve got to go stand in line!”

Hey, it ain’t perfect yet, but it looks like we’re getting there.

I'm Moira Gunn. This is Five Minutes.