our opinions: CURMUDGEON MUSINGS
The Last
BY MARK BROWN
Word
On Junk Mail, Junk Calls
And— The Over-Abundance of Condiments
As I‘ve said before, the world is a complicated place and
it seems to get worse everyday.
So, we have to fight these battles everyday and keep
fighting but maybe we can find a little humor in, along the
way, at least that’s how I survive.
I’ve got three examples for you in this issue —Junk
mail, Robo calls and grocery stores.
I have a question. Everybody that I know is worried
about the environment. All newspapers focus on it, all the
talk shows, all the news programs focus on it and with
good reason. I think about it as well.
I remember when I was in school a long, long time
ago, we were told with the advent of the computer world,
there would be much less paper consumed.
Well, that prediction certainly missed its mark.
We use more paper now than ever. Now we’re
burdened with communicating by email, so you send an
email, then everyone has to print it off. So we recycle,
we’re all doing everything possible to avoid being waste-
ful. So, I say that to say this. It was not until I got a post
office box, that I was exposed to the dreadful, horribly
out-of-control junk mail disaster. I certainly have been
aware of the existence of junk mail. We get plenty of it
at our house, but I recently rented a post office box, and
folks, all I can say about this is, “WOW.”
I have a medium-sized P.O. box and about every three
days it is completely filled up, but that’s not the story here.
At the Post Office, they have a large table by the boxes,
and it’s there to allow you to go through your mail or get
packages ready. It wasn’t until I saw other people spread-
ing their mail on that table and sorting through it, that I
realized, “Houston, we’ve got a problem!”
The sheer volume of junk mail being thrown away is
incredible. I saw a lady with her mail taking up half of the
large table, I had to just watch, it took at least 10 minutes
for her to sort through and decide what she’s going to
keep and what she’s going to throw out. And the amount
of junk she discarded was incredible, she ended up with
just a small stack of keepers. It just makes me think, if you
just multiplied all the Post Offices in just the United States,
112
by the junk mail that is thrown out everyday, it would be
scary. There is just something so absurd about that much
unwanted stuff that we all get for really no reason. I guess
that’s just the American way.
Now if you hate junk mail as much as I do, how the
heck do you feel about Robo calls? Robo calls have really
changed us. They’ve changed how we live. Robo call jerks
are really good at what they do, which actually makes it
a really interesting game. Robo call, jerk IT people have
figured out how to make a call mirror our prefixes, so we
think, “this call must be from someone I know, because
they get really close to our numbers.” So, now I don’t
answer anything that is not in my data base, and that can
be fun. So now I’m missing calls I should have taken, but
you just can’t trust anyone anymore. Last week, I got irri-
tated and answered one, I was for sure it was a Robo call,
and sure enough when I answered I got this person on the
phone that was obviously in a room with 500 other Robo
callers — all yelling in the background. They wanted to
talk about selling me an extended warranty on a car I
haven’t owned in three years.
But, my first clue that the caller didn’t really know me
was that she couldn’t properly pronounce my name.
On a different note, my wife and I have a grocery
problem. We need help. I just looked in the refrigera-
tor and there were 4 boxes of butter, 3 new bottles of
ketchup, 4 new jars of Mayo, 5 bottles of mustard, about 6
jars of relish, more bottles of BBQ sauce than I can count.
Problem is we go to the store separately most of time and
we must just guess at what we might need, even when we
go together we end up buying duplicate stuff. And it’s not
like we are not trying to quit. We are. I’m now looking
for some kind of 12-step program for grocery over-buyers,
GOB for short. In fact, I have talked to others who suffer
from this disease. We are all concerned, I’ve already
added a wing on to our medicine cabinet to handle all the
meds. I don’t want to have to do the same to our pantry.
So those of you who suffer from GOB, look for a soon–
to-be-available support group in our community. We need
help!