Kathleen McCall:
Occasional�� Muse�

2001-08-14 - 11:01 a.m.

More Confessions

"Want us to mail that to you?"

"No! Oh God no! No, I'll come pick it up!"

or,

"We mailed that to you three weeks ago. Did you receive it?"

"Um...I'm not sure."

"It should have arrived on the twelfth, Ms. McCall. Did you get it or not?"

"Well...I have to go now."

I have a problem with mail. A real problem.

I'm a mailophobe. A - what? Is there a name? I'll have to look it up. There should be.

I hate my mail.

Yesterday I was considering starting a letter writing campaign. If I get everyone I know to send me one piece of GOOD snail mail a week, I should have something to look forward to every day, right? I could give everyone self addressed stamped envelopes. I could go to the bank and get a whole bunch of crisp dollar bills and have my friends mail them to me one by one. Then I'd want to get my mail.

But I'd probably just grab the envelopes with my own handwriting and run.

There's nothing to like about my mail. My mail is full of letter bombs. If you ignore your mail long enough, that's what happens. Letter bombs from companies who expected to get some of those dollar bills and didn't. Companies who have asked nicely, and asked less nicely, and are now stamping CONFIDENTIAL TO DEADBEAT on the envelope.

They just don't understand.

See, I don't have time right now to get the mail. I can't deal with it today. It will just have to wait. And then tomorrow, they bring more even though I haven't used the LAST stuff they brought me, they just stuff it through the slot anyway. Now there's twice as much, and I can't deal with THAT. And then - you got it - they bring some MORE, and now it's falling on the floor of the garage, and who wants to deal with that? There's nothing good in there anyway, and there's no point bringing all that bad juju in my house, especially when I don't get paid until Friday. Friday is the day the kids go to their father's, so it's my day off, and who wants to clean the garage and open mail addressed to "Poor Credit Risk" on a day off? So then...well, you have the idea.

My mailman laughs at me. I'm the only person on his route who, when she sees him, runs INSIDE. I'm the only person whose mail has to be jammed through a stuffed up mail slot that is four feet off the ground. Four feet of mail. You think there's anything good in there? I don't.

But when people mail me things, they always seem to want to know if I got them. "Did you get my card? My letter? The photographs? The certified copies of your mother's will?" What IS IT with people? What, they think I have nothing else to do but read my mail?

I HATE mail. I don't even think a dollar is enough to get me to read my mail. I think it would take at least ten dollars, and I don't have that many ten dollar bills to mail to myself. I'd have to use the same one over and over, and I'd probably catch on after a while.

I order things on the net that get mailed, but I can always tell, because they're bulkier envelopes, so I can pick them right off the top and run. Or half the time they don't fit through the mail slot, so the postman, who thinks I'm a riot, puts them on the chair by the front door. WITH the mail. He doesn't catch me with that, though. I keep the packages and throw the mail out into the garage. "No mail! No mail can come in my house!"

You can guess how popular I am with the local merchants. Hey, they need something from me, they can PHONE. They eventually do. "You want money? Okay, I'll bring you some." They always want to know if I have the bill. Now that's stupid. If I had the bill, I would have PAID the bill. It's in the mail. Just look up my balance, and call me again in a few months when you need more money.

How did this happen? I've never really liked mail a whole lot, once I got old enough to stop getting birthday cards from anyone but my insurance guy. Then I mail ordered something - the first step on the long road to insanity - and pretty soon my name got sold and I started getting catalogs like "The Very Best Southwestern Furniture" and "1001 Repulsively Personal Grooming Gadgets with Batteries." Haven't bought anything at all in many years; still get 20 catalogs a day, and they all say "This is your LAST catalog! Yes! Your absolutely positively LAST CHANCE EVER to own a Rotary Nose Hair Clipper!" Then I had to take on my father's mail, so I not only got all his bills and important stuff, I got all HIS catalogs. Now I'm up to forty of fifty pieces of mail a day. I go down to the post office, where the postmistress laughs at me. "You want to stop your junk mail? You and everybody else in the world!" I'm standing there and it's dawning on me that she makes a LIVING from junk mail. We're not on the same side here. She LOVES mail. Mail is her life. I have nothing to say to this woman.

And then, having been away from my home for a few hours to go to the post office, the mail was piling up. And so started the cycle.

I want to change. I really do. I want to be one of those people who says brightly, "Oh! The mail's here!" like it was some sort of a beneficial service, some sort of a high point in your day. "Let's see what came!" I want to go out and get it all, all today's mail, every day, and I want to be able to do it with one hand instead of a hand truck. I want to sort through it on the way in...bill, bill, trash, oh! letter!...and toss the garbage, put the bills in the spiffy bill organizer which I will buy for that purpose, and sit down calmly to read my nice letter and get my ten dollars. I want to be NORMAL.

I want a secretary. I want a backhoe. I want a blowtorch. I want an unlisted address. And I hope I get these things BEFORE I start wanting that Rotary Nose Hair Clipper.

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