At war with the Post Office

Posted by Neverclear on 28.08.06

For as long as I can remember I've hated the telephone and mail. Why society decided to primarily communicate in the two most obtrusive forms of annoyance ever invented is a question for the ages, but as time goes on I've steadily noticed more and more large corporations growing angry with me for avoiding their attempted correspondance. To date I've been threatened with lawsuits, debt collection, repossession, and one engineering young lad even mentioned sending large men to my door in an effort to collect some payment stub in some letter in some trashcan I didn't bother opening. Just for fun I found his payment stub and glued it along with the envelope of prepaid "Business reply mail" to half a brick. Really never found out how the post office got around sending a brick displaying a stub warning "destruction of this form is illegal by any other party not the intended recipient", but I didn't really have the money anyway so probably better for all concerned. All of these experiments in living outside the postal system have made me the scourge of corporations that often forget the Madmax of my generation isn't lying around some desert fighting Tina Turner in mythical Thunderdomes. Everyday we wake up, delete our voice mail, throw away our unopened letters, and wait for you to learn how to use the Internet in the communication game. Unfortunately this is no where near as cool as Madmax, but I did make sure to park my car like an asshole last time I filled the tanks taking up two pumps at a busy station.

The main thing to remember when ignorring the mail is everyday you have to make a conscious effort to destory as much correspondance as possible while providing a possibility you may just be opening this mail so they don't start resending it. I made the stupid mistake of telling Citibank their letters went straight from my mailbox to my garbage can provoking them to not to stop sending me mail, but adopt the ingeniuous policy of filling my trashcan with so much mail one letter was bound to fall off the top and be opened. So I bought a 50 gallon trashcan... TAKE THAT CITIBANK! However, just in case you're not comfortable with the financial ruin that can occur 'living off the grid' and hiding from the Skynet of the future the rest of this article will provide all of the base rules to opening the abosolute minimum of mail while keeping your impeccable citizen status.

WARNING! The man about to tell you how to be a good citizen thinks this only entails not driving through the neighbors yard on even numbered days, and was twice too drunk to fill out the 2000 census form prompting the census taker to do it for him.

Only Open Colored Envelopes

This rule works on the simple concept if they really wanted you to notice them they would take the time to spice up their envelops with some festive colors. The pinnicle of our evolution is man's fear of red and yellow items prompting people to not only stop their cars at lights but swerve to hit clowns walking down the sidewalk. Because of our natural fear of colors most companies won't send a red item through the mail attempting to coax you into opening the peaceful white envelope containing a nice request to give them money for some service supposedly offered to you in the fall of '76. Beware, these are only their decoy envelopes to prove you exist somewhere they can contact and could lure you into a dangerous game of chance and letter roulette.

The Red Envelope: These are hard to get and usually mean you owe somebody thousands of dollars for school, tax evasion, both, or on one special occurence somebody I didn't like died and the family decided to celebrate by mailing everybody that didn't like them red envelopes. Actually, that was the most awesome use of the mail ever, but in general you can read the phone number on the back of these envelopes and figure out what's in them. After you do this throw the unopened letter away and pay them next month. Nobody red envelopes me and gets prompt payment.

The Yellow Envelope: Yea I don't know what's in these because I never open them. Sometimes they lead to red envelopes and sometimes the people just stop sending you letters.

The Green Envelope: Everytime I get one of these I write down the name of the corporation that sent it and consider our business done. Sure, I've never really 'opened' one of these and 'read' whatever is inside, but I know the color green means go and going forward is a good thing. So I must have pleased whoever sent it enough they're congratulating me on going forward in life, but just to be sure it's fun to wrap these in red envelopes and write "Return to Sender" on the red envelope with "You've been Punk'd" on the Green envelope. Hey, if you send the green envelope we're good enough friends now you can take some postal service ribbing all in good fun.

Call the company and ask what's inside.

Explain to them you can never be too careful with all the Anthrax flying through the mail nowadays, and just to be safe you're going to need the name of the employee responsible for quality inspecting all out going packages. Progress into a long and winding rant about the success of the Unibomber all because concerned citizens like yourself didn't take the time to confirm sender, originating state, sexuallity of sender (it's a well known fact in George Bush's gov'ment gay people have AIDS and put it in the mail to kill good Christians and steal tax money), and contents of package. If necessary cite some imaginary postal regulation giving good citizens with 20 or more skeeball tickets the constitutional right to question their mail and forces the sender to verify all contents by mailing tax code, but not the taxing bar mail identity tag. Eventually you either get banned from the call center or they offer you some kind of E-bill-online-super-highway-payment-PRO!(tm) system in exchange for mail. Hey, that's a victory either way in my book.

Say you're blind and can't read the mail.

Actually this doesn't work at all and they send you this fucked up looking punch card letters with bumps and dots. I think if you put the entire series together they form one big wall of magic eye picture calling you obscentities if you stand far enough back. Of course, the police always want proof of this and I've not saved enough of them to prove it "beyond a shadow of a doubt" (whatever the fuck that means)... but any day now they're going to slip up.

Hire a red man to open the mail.

If the proud people of the North American continent can rise up and dominate the gambling industry then they're qualified to open my mail. This is the best route to actually get your mail opened and often if you toss them a few dollars and raccoon pelts you can get an Excel spreadsheet outlining the mail trends of your household. Of course, finding Indians nowadays isn't really possible seeing as we killed them all, but my roommate is more than happy to open my mail for $50 a month although he doesn't like being called Squanto too much. However, when you're paying Native American prices for letter opening you're buying the priviledge to refer to your friends and family as 'Little Sitting Whooping Owl', 'One who handles my meager correspondance', or my personal favorite, 'Mississippi Jim'. I will point out sometimes my monthly spreadsheet is devoid of red letter mentions when I know damn well red letters came and it's no doubt some trick of Indian giving that will all be worth it when that smallpox laden envelope arrives.

Living far from the touch of a good postal woman may leave you cold and lonely on those dark midwestern nights, but in a world that invented Saddam Hussein you can't be too careful nowadays. Sometimes even the cleanest mail hussy is nothing but the barer of bad news up to and including tuition payments, pregnancy scares, and the dreaded clap. A life of mail celibacy is a hard one indeed and before this analogies start to dangerously allude to some kind of non-existent real life celibacy I'll make mention to a story about the treachery of the United States Postal Service you should use as a warning to future encounters with letters. Once in college there was this guy on our floor that loved to drink and loved to open mail. He was a bit eccentric in his habits of micromanaging every letter that came his way often times too hammered on Apple Schnapps to realize that last profanity laden reply was stapled to a car insurance payment, failing grade card, and notice from the Dean (not the good kind) complete with an envelope addressed to his dying Great Grandmother. Little did we all know there is no screening process for letters sent through local mail hubs and you can take an educated guess as to the outcome of his reckless mailing habits, thus proving once and for all, even cowboys riding hundreds of miles daily on ponies in express fashion can't be trusted.

Article by William 'Neverclear' Cavindash of TMYK.net and Site73.com