The tale of my mail: little excitement, plenty of volume
By By Jane Holahan
Updated Feb 19, 2007 15:52
I still get a little jump of excitement when I see the mail. Will there be a letter from a long-lost friend? An unexpected check? An invitation to some fancy party?
The possibilities are wide open.
Of course I am disappointed.
My mail consists almost entirely of three things: bills, charitable requests and most of all, credit-card and loan applications.
Doesn’t it seem like monthly bills come more than once a month? You cringe at the credit-card bills, curse at the cable bill and swear you just paid the phone bill a week ago.
And the time you have to pay the bill without incurring a late fee is getting shorter and shorter. Don’t put those bills aside, because pretty soon they’ll end up in a pile with all your junk mail, you’ll forget about them, and before you know it, they’re overdue.
That happens to me way too much. I’ve even thrown bills out because I thought they were junk mail.
Not good.
Don’t ever, ever make the mistake of giving to a charity. Once you give, too many ask you to give more and more and more. And then you get on a list, and other charities ask you to give and give and give.
And there’s the guilt thing: Only you can save the starving children. Without your help, the whales will become extinct. Horrible diseases could be cured if only you’d give.
But the guilt gets even worse when you start using the free address labels they send you.
You don’t ask for them, you haven’t even said you’ll give anything, but there they are. It would be a shame to waste them. Nobody else in the whole wide world can use them except you.
I was once involved in a correspondence with a man I was trying to impress, and I used a label from Amnesty International on one of my letters.
Yes, he noticed and seemed impressed with my commitment to world justice, but then he asked me, once we’d moved on to phone conversations, if I actually gave money to Amnesty International.
Um, mumble, mumble, no. There was a long, judgmental silence from him.
Isn’t postal bribery illegal?
I’m only kidding about not giving to charity, of course. Just be prepared for lots more mail — and more guilt — if you do decide to be generous.
The vast majority of my mail comes from credit-card companies.
I can’t get over how nice they all are, how eager they are to help me out.
They send me blank checks I can use any way I want.
They want to give me loans. Big loans.
And they are very eager for me to use those nice plastic cards (which they let me design myself!) to buy whatever my little heart desires. More often than not, I’m already pre-approved.
Isn’t that nice.
Then there are the offers to pay off the debt I’ve accumulated. (How did that happen, I wonder?)
All you have to do is read the teeny tiny fine print and find out what the rules are. Like how the interest rate jumps from 0 percent to 35 percent if you break one of those itty bitty rules.
I gave up on trying to figure out just how deeply in debt I would be if I took up all their kind offers. But I hear that even people who’ve declared bankruptcy begin getting credit-card applications after a few months.
Isn’t that just too nice!
The lengths to which junk-mailers go to get us to open their envelopes simply amaze me.
Some feature “Must Open Or You’ll Die!” messages on them.
But more and more, they feature script fonts that look like they were hand-written — a letter from a friend!
You know, the kind of mail we never get.
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The Voices column is written by a rotating team of New Era staffers. It appears Mondays.
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