If you have an e-mail account, you get junk mail. Don’t deny
it. You can call it a subscription. You can tell me you enjoy those daily pickle
recipes. You can lie about wanting to receive hourly reminders that this is
positively the very, very, absolute, honest-to-goodness LAST notice that you
may be a grand prizewinner. It’s all junk and it’s clogging up your inbox.
There are days when you wish you could toss your emails into a virtual bonfire
just to avoid deleting each one.
I thought I received a lot of junk e-mail - until I started
collecting my neighbors’ postal mail during their six-month stay in Florida.
Since late December we’ve been taking care of their cat
(technically, half-cat, since she resides with us half the year), watering
their plants (Spouse’s job – plants and I don’t mix), and taking in their mail.
This last chore has proven over the years to be a lesson in refraining from
ever checking the “yes” box on any type of solicitation.
Somehow Mrs. Neighbor has managed to get onto every mailing
list imaginable. Whether it’s a plea to save the yellow-winged gnat of North
Dakota or a request to join the International Society of Left-Handed Ping Pong
Players, my neighbor receives it. Clearly, some pieces are easier than others
to discard. You could easily fuel a two-week bonfire with all the unsolicited
mail that passes through that mailbox.
There are some instances when it’s hard to make the decision
about whether to keep or toss something. Take, for instance, the request for
funding of certain reputable organizations that include a nickel with their
appeal. Talk about a tough call. You wouldn’t feel right about getting rid of
it because, after all, they sent you a nickel. Maybe you would have guilt over
opening the envelope and keeping the nickel without sending a donation. For
these reasons, this type sits in the limbo stack to be dealt with later.
Our neighbors do get some important mail, like renewals that
they actually want and bills that I sure as heck don’t want. I dare not remove
the most recent LL Bean catalog from their collection, and I have dutifully
forwarded the Navy Times to their Florida residence. My incentive to properly
tend to the regular onslaught of someone else’s mail is that it takes up too
much space on my kitchen table and counter, and those areas are under constant
threat of being buried even without anyone else’s mail.
Each winter I vow to rip off the address labels, send them
to each of these solicitors and ask to have the neighbors’ address removed from
these lists. There are a few issues with this.
First, I would have to use my envelopes and buy stamps to
mail something to a company to tell them not to mail anything. That’s just too
much irony for me.
Second, as the envelopes and parcels begin to gather in my
little kitchen, the prospect of contacting every unsolicited piece suddenly
sounds like a big old chore, similar to washing the dishes or folding the
laundry.
And finally, it can be somewhat amusing to see the lengths
solicitors will go to for a cause, no matter how strange. We should all
consider how important the survival of the purple-bellied legless lizard of
southern California could be to the environment.
From now until the end of the year the only mail I will have
to face is what gets delivered directly to our home. But I know that by the
time our seasonal assignment comes along there will be new invitations to sign
up for and some very original petitions for patronage.
I wonder how our neighbors would feel about a bonfire in their mailbox.
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