Catalog and Unwanted Mailings

These days you must be living in Outer Space or in Mongolia not to receive them: daily stacks of unwanted catalogs and mailings. I like the clean and tidy look of my house: driveway sweep ed, trees are pruned and windows clean. Including my mailbox; and when I drive my car off that very clean driveway my mailbox looks pristine and empty.

After returning home after an hour or so my house looks as if there has been a catastrophe in my absence. My poor mailbox is crammed with paper and apparently what couldn't be jammed inside is thrown all over the street. My real mail of course might or might not be there, bills are sometimes hidden in catalogs. And because I didn't know I had bills, it's unlikely that they are going to be paid. Of course, for the time being I live a rather care-free-bill-free life. So in a way I welcome the catalogs and unwanted mailings. If this could be arranged in a more orderly way I wouldn't have too many problems with them. But I have to tidy my front-lawn every day and that's a point of disenchantment. Because someone once told me: if you put yourself on $200 per hour, would you still waste your time? And since I took that information to heart, it costs me at least $250 to clean it up every day. Over 7 days that is a loss of $ 1750!! And since I like trees so much I also send all the unwanted mail back to where it came from so they can recycle the paper. That costs me about $50 a day extra plus driving to the Post office and again 1 hour at my hourly rate of $200, because I like to chat with that nice man at the Post office and I spend at least an hour there. Now we are, if my math is right, at $3850 a week just getting rid of my unwanted mail!

But the real culprits in my area are the Real Estate people. They claim to have buyers literally falling over their feet to get their hot little hands on my house. I never see these buyers so I doubt it. What I do see are all these Real Estate people walking energetically up and down my street, adding more junk mail in my letterbox.(or somewhere in my garden). I cannot stop these folks from cluttering my mailbox, because that would involve a conversation with them and at $200 an hour I can't afford to chat away my time. It all ads up you see, and before you know it I have crossed the $4000 per week mark.

But since I'm still waiting for someone to pay me $4000 a week, I have come up with a solution: I put a garbage-can on the exact spot where my mailbox used to be. I painted: "Mail here please" on it in a fluorescent orange, which can be even seen in the dark.(and possibly the Space shuttle). This is handy because every Friday the garbage-collector just picks it all up.

My mailbox stays empty and pristine....exactly the way I like it.