I remember when I used to open my mail.
When I was nine, Dickie Schimmel came over with a letter he'd just received from President Johnson, thanking him for having written to say that he was against the Vietnam war. It was typed and everything. Man, in a world where Dickie could get a letter from the White House, anything could happen. In such a world, you bet I always opened my mail: You never knew whether it might be a check from an aunt, a letter from a girl or your brother's draft notice. I remember showing Dickie that day a great letter from my Aunt Mildred, who had the gout. I wouldn't let him look at the check.
Learning later that presidents don't actually write their own letters was a grave disappointment until my English teacher pointed out that John Milton had not actually written Paradise Lost but dictated it, and that even Shakespeare didn't compose his own material but had gotten Francis Bacon to do it for him. President Johnson was in good company.
Over the years, my habit of opening the mail persisted, if only out of common courtesy to the sender. It's the kind of behavior civilized societies have a right to take for granted, and that well-bred parents used to drum into well-bred youths. Whether my mother was at that time on the take from the Direct Marketing Association is more than I could say.
It was while working for the University that I first began to suspect I'd been a patsy. Sure, I was accustomed to handling the daily sackful of press releases about products I would never buy, and organization change notices that were out of date before they'd been mailed. But when they sent me a catalog for L'Eggs panty hose, I saw the handwriting on the wall. That catalog may have been addressed to me, but it wasn't for me. Neither, come to think of it, was most of the paper overflowing my mailbox. So I stopped opening it.
Overnight I changed from a broken man unable to maintain his childhood ideals to a modern-day hero who'd had the guts to draw a line in the sand. My inbox cleared, my hair started to come back and dogs stopped sniffing me on the street. If the President wrote me todayÉ oh but gosh, come to think of it, he did, just before the primaries. I threw it out, and phoned the post office begging them to increase their rates. We have to hit these people where it hurts.
Still, with my newfound freedom came the ability to savor the finer points of direct mail. Gone are the bad old days when fixed and variable data didn't consort well: "Congratulations, Mr. BAERMAN, you and Mrs. BAERMAN may have won one million dollars in stamps. All you and the other little BAERMANS need to do to claim your prize is to send $10 to the address below."
No, today's messages reflect subtle micromarketing techniques: "Dear Mr. Baerman (may I call you Paul?): When you bought the 16-ounce package of Philadelphia Cream Cheese at the Food Lion last Wednesday, you probably didn't realize that you were our 10,348th customer. This entitles you to send $10 to the address below."
There's an inverse relationship these days between the starkness of the envelope and the importance of what is inside. Though some folks still pine for the bright colors and baubles that engaged us a decade ago, it's the sober-sided, puritanical items one ventures to open in 1997.
The marketers are a step ahead, of course. Two or three times a month, I receive an apparently hand-addressed envelope with a real stamp on it, in my mother's handwriting and showing her return address. I have no idea what product they're peddling, because of course I discard it at once, but their persistence annoys me. I also get a lot of religious mailings because people in my zip code tend to go to Hell.
To find out who sold my name to whom, I began using my dog Sasha's name on subscriptions. The myriad credit card offers she received were merely humorous at first, but when she finally began getting phone calls interrupting her dinner to sell her financial planning services, I knew they'd gone too far.
Now Sasha doesn't open her mail either.
Paul Baerman, Fuqua '90, is a Durham resident.
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