Shaken, Not Stirred: Mail call.

June 26, 2016

Jim Bond

Shaken, Not Stirred, a blog by Jim Bond.

The postman is meticulous about bunching my mail together; larger items at the back, so there is a tidy stack to slide through the slot in my door.

When I retrieve it, it’s splayed all over the floor, mostly face down, making all of his orderly preparation a moot point.

Nonetheless, I pick it up from various corners of the ‘mudroom’, re-assemble in a manner which the postman had intended and sit down to peruse.

OK, the water bill (smallest of the notices, as if to tell me water is unimportant [tell that to my co-workers and those at the local grocery store]). Then, a notice from an insurance company indicating that they can save me BIG dollars. This is the same company which should have considered re-checking my policy before I abandoned them so I could save BIG dollars from another company a few years ago.

Another, larger piece urged me to send money to God. Um, OK.

But the one that catches my attention is salmon-colored cardstock with designs on it. Quality stuff. Despite the sender and addressee being typed or computer generated, my interest is piqued…party invitation? I muse. It is a respectable downtown address.

So, I rip it open, wondering where my planner is (they don’t call them ‘calendars’ anymore, thanks to the Yuppies).

“You have received this invitation today because you best represent the segment of the population which is most likely to experience hearing loss and tinnitus…”

Dashed are my hopes of pulling my dusty tuxedo and patent leather shoes out of the closet to attend a gala affair. This was to be an examination to determine if my hearing loss is a simple build-up of earwax, or something much more sinister.

Well…I know where this originated. You see, almost a decade ago I developed ‘selective hearing loss’, much like the Peanuts cartoons when adults are speaking. “Blah, blah-blah, blah-blah.” The person who launched my ‘selective hearing loss’ was constantly coming up with new methods of improving my life, despite my life being already considerably improved from the norm. So, I would smile and nod in the appropriate places, until I picked up something in the monologue which would catch my attention, such as:

“The basement is flooding!” Or, “I just totaled my car.” Or, “I think I’m pregnant.”

“I’m sorry, what was that?”

“TURN UP YOU MIRACLE EAR!”

Shortly after that came the mail solicitations. And they just keep coming. I’d prefer e-mail notifications so I could go to the ‘unsubscribe’ link. But that doesn’t work too well anyway.

So, occasionally these invitations still come in the mail, indicating that if it ISN’T wax, I can solve the problem with a device which costs JUST $695*! (after my discount of $20 from a national pharmacy whose name I won’t mention because of potential lawsuit, but whose moniker may indicate some Irish derivation).