Mail bonding
Here’s my problem: I’ve got too many dang mailboxes and they’re all full of crap. Worse, it’s election season, which unfortunately coincides with pre-holiday season, effectively doubling the amount of paper and electronic messages that fill up the boxes faster than I can possibly empty them.
The email boxes, of which I have two, one personal and one professional, have a “worth reading” ratio of about one-half of a percent, which means I have to delete 99-and-a-half percent of my emails on a regular basis. I am quite sure that there will soon be a “do not mail” list, similar to the “do not call” list that will take only a few dozen emails to activate.
What really gets me is that the emails you really look for seem to hang around in cyberspace forever while they’re waiting to get through the latest crucial notices from every travel, bank, book, appliance, stock, political and radio website that you have ever contacted.
And how about all those not-for-profits that you donated to last year, reminding you that the end of the year is only three months away? It’s enough to make you never want to give any money at all to an organization that “requires” your email in order to donate.
“Welcome Tom, you have 263 unread messages in your inbox, just from today, and that’s after we routed the spam to another mailbox that, if you dare go there, has 3,458 unread messages in it.
“But don’t worry, you have unlimited storage space in your mail room. And even if your email box gets filled up, we can route extra mail to your cell phone voice mailbox, which by our count only has 342 messages in it, 63 of which are marked for automatic deletion within nine days, which means you’d better listen to them if you have time, which of course you don’t otherwise you’d be cleaning up this mailbox which is seriously clogged up. Have a nice day!”
My teacher email is way worse, because even a cat can figure out your email address if they know the address of even one other person in your organization.
Besides the sometimes legitimate emails from administrators and the purchasing, guidance, maintenance, personnel, energy and professional workshop departments, there’s the usual onslaught from software and spyware companies, as well as the 70 or so companies that send me guilt-ridden pleas to buy their products so I can become a better educator because I really owe it to my students. If these companies really want me to become a better educator they should just let me teach instead of answering or, most often, deleting their plaintive notices.
Remember when you were a kid and you were so happy when you got a piece of mail? That was because it was usually a birthday card with money in it or a secret decoder ring that you waited eight months to get after eating 30 boxes of puffed wheat. Those were the days when smiling mail carriers, whistling as they walked, would receive and deliver your mail through a slot in your door or in a nice covered box on your porch or near the curb. The reason that postal carriers are disappearing is because it has become virtually impossible to carry more than three house’s worth of daily mail in a bag.
I have two physical mailboxes, one at work and one here at home. It is quite possible that teachers get more mail than anyone, so much that it takes two addresses to receive it all. If I forget to go to my regular post office box even just one day, the resulting crush of mail either makes working the combination lock physically impossible, or worse, forces the postal employee to pry all the mail into a large gray plastic bin.
A yellow card indicating that there’s a bushel of mail waiting for me just stays in the box day after day because I cannot physically get home in time to visit the counter and retrieve the mail-bale. So by Saturday I need my trusty pick-up to fetch what is by now three or four sequoias worth of paper, and just in case there is a birthday card or decoder ring in it, I haul it back to the house and add it to the pile from last week that I’ve not had the time to sort. To their credit, the post office has provided a 55-gallon drum near the sidewalk for junk mail that only needs emptying five times per day. What they really need is a 3-yard dumpster that could easily hold two, maybe three days worth of paper spam. I thought, way back when I built my recycling shed, that plastic would be the most voluminous material that would need hauling away. Not a chance. Paper, and lots of it, goes to the trailer at the dump every week.
I’ll bet that the bonehead who said computers would one day create the “paperless office” is now an ink salesman for Hewlett Packard. I’d like to get his email address!