Return To Sender

This truck was parked next to me when I left the office today. Man, talk about hostility. Or it could be that the Stupid Convention is in town again. I can think of a bunch of people I wouldn't want behind me at a light if I'm driving this thing. (click on image to enlarge) When I was a boy living amidst the cornfields and rolling hills of eastern Nebraska, I had a dream. I dreamed that one day I would invent a car that ran on....drumroll.....JUNK MAIL! Okay so that's a lie. We were so poor that we only had broken dreams, and we got those used. When I was a kid, we were so poor that my dad sold the mailbox, so we didn't have junk mail. Our mailman would just hurl whatever came for us out the window of his truck as he drove past. My mom would tell my brother and me to go get the mail out of the road. We only brought in first-class, the junk stayed where it fell. Of course, counting on a 9 and 7 year-old to sort your mail is dicey. The only real mail that ever came was letters to my mom from her many sisters. We never sent mail because postage was four cents. I'm not kidding. This is not joke. My dad wrote a local monthly newsletter. He sold ads to make money from it. Rather than mailing out 500 or 600 of these things he made my brother and me deliver them on foot to every house. We got $4 bucks, to split. The good part is that we lived in government housing, so we had no house payment, no electric bill, no gas bill and no water bill. Cable hadn't been invented, so no cable bill either. We did have a telephone bill, but my dad didn't pay it monthly. He would wait until they called with a final warning and then pay it at the drug store, sometimes before it was turned off. In fact, he couldn't mail it if he wanted to because my folks never had a checking account until I was in high school. My dad was a gadget man though. He loved a good gadget. I am a second generation gadget man myself. His gadgets were much bigger in those days, than they are today. He owned the original Polaroid Land Camera. It cost about $250 in 1959. It was as big as a small picnic cooler. He bought an ironing machine, with a roller presser. Why my mom thought this giant machine was better than her iron and ironing board was a mystery to me. After about a month she gave up on it and we used it for a desk. He bought a very big and expensive swiss watch, that broke and was never fixed. When times were tough he sold them cheap. I learned the old "buy high, sell low" from my dad. Nothing was safe from beig sold. He came home one day and announced that he had given away our dog. I think he really sold her. Anyway, back to my junk mail powered car. How great would that be? It is nearly to the point that junk mail is all we get. I get credit card offers by the ton. I also get crappy magazines, newsletters, coupons, exciting offers, insurance comparisons and offical looking envelopes with fake checks for sales I wouldn't be caught dead at. My stock broker sends proxy forms, prospectus', and various legal notices. I give money to several groups so they reward me by giving my name to other groups. I get solitiations asking for donations by the bushel. Last year I was swamped by donation requests that included free mailing labels as a gift. That is the word they used, gift. I accepted them as a gift and chucked the donation requests. Since I send only one check per month, personalized return labels last a long time. I have about a million. I didn't give a single penny to the groups that sent me labels last year, so they have upped the ante this year. I am swimming in calendars. This is the 21at damn century, who needs a wall calendar? Anyway, if I can just perfect my junk mail flux capacitor, I'm set for life. I will also need a version for when they invent the virtual car. I can use junk email. My email consists entirely of offers for degrees online, which are good because there is no work involved according to the senders. There are also a bunch of lonley women looking for a guy like me, plus some fine online pharmacies standing by with all my drug needs. I don't have any real friends, so I don't get personal emails. Only about 1 in 100 of my emails is legitimate, I have plenty to spare. I'm telling you this is an idea who's time has come. Send me $5 and I will send you a set of blueprints to build your own junk mail flux capacitor. I will throw in some precription meds and a PhD if you act now. Merle Things in this blog represented to be fact, may or may not actually be true. The writer is frequently wrong and sometimes just full of it. Tag: Daily Life Personal Finance Humor