All those wasted trees

I’ve been living in Castricum for a while now, and things are going well. My interior is improving bit by bit, I’m finally getting the feeling I’m coming home when I get here. All’s awesome on that account.

When I was still painting the walls here, before I’d actually moved in, I noticed the massive amounts of mail my mailbox gathered each day. When I’d been gone for a few days, I’d find that the mailman had stuffed the last bit in there with force. I always feel better with an empty mailbox and I got sick of all the excess paper, so I started trying to get rid of all unwanted stuff.

So when I moved in, my first move was a NEE/NEE-sticker (which says ‘no, I don’t want local newspapers and no, I don’t want flyers with commercials etc’). That solved just a fragment of it, at least the big heaps of newspapers were gone.

However, the previous inhabitants got a shitload of mail. By a shitload I mean, at least 4 pieces of it a day, varying from ads to loans to payments to magazines to lots of porn I never wanted to see. During the move, they picked up their mail several times, each time claiming they were going to cancel or move the services.

At the time I had two things: his phone number and her e-mail address. First I tried calling the guy, let’s call him Guy. I talked to him, he said ‘sure I’ll come pick up the mail next weekend’, I stayed home all weekend and called again. No answer, no Guy. I tried that again, then it actually succeeded because I said I’d throw it out if he didn’t drop by. He solemnly pledged to move all the services in his mail. He didn’t, not even a single one of them.

Some time later I’d gathered a new big pile, and I thought I’d be kind. I asked for their new address in an e-mail I sent the girl, let’s call her Girl. I happily got it, because Girl knew it’d be way easier to have a free mail forwarding service than to pick it up themselves. I sent them a costly package by mail once, knowing it’d solve nothing.

Anger was building up, but now I had a tool: their new address. At that point I started keeping up with whatever I got, how I dealt with it and what the result was. Everything I could easily send back with the right address on it, I did. If I found an easy phone number, I called it. I made absolutely sure every service was moved instead of deleted. Perhaps that’s evil, but then I couldn’t resist. It was the one way I could show them how much I care about their mail getting to them properly!

I have some stats for the amount of mail I got. I started this file on 5 april 2010, lots and lots of mail had already passed before I started indexing it. So that’s 5 months worth of mail. The file shows I’ve had mail from 27 different companies, and most of them didn’t get the first notice of the address change. I missed a few things while indexing, so I estimate I got around 85-90 pieces of mail (27 times 3, give or take a few, some companies were really persistent). A few themes were big with them: scouting, charities, diabetes and porn. The charities were particularly difficult to cancel. The highlight of this adventure was when I got a nice anonymous package delivered. Two cockrings, addressed to Guy.

Now my mailbox is relatively quiet. I do still receive Quest, a monthly magazine full of fun facts. Quest doesn’t care if their payment gets bounced or their letters get returned, I still get the magazine. It’s good reading material for in the bathroom. Next to that, I still receive mail from WWF (bunch of sad pandas they must be) and every now and then a new type of loan. I wonder when they’re going to send me flowers. They’d certainly look better on my coffee table than that pile of paper…