Send it addressee unknown
BY Bill Duncan
The View From Here
Funny how little things help you make a big decision. For more than two years my wife and I have been discussing selling the acres in rural Roseburg and moving into the city.
We have come to a decision. We are not moving.
It is not the fact that I dread cleaning out the barn of 30 years of accumulation. It is not the fear of downsizing. It is not the fact the house fits us like an old shoe.
It is not even that our granddaughter, Melissa, wrote so movingly about her fond memories of visiting her grandparents in this old house.
It is none of these. What it boils down to is all of those address stickers that charities have sent us over the years in hope of a donation.
At Christmas we decided to thin the batch. There is a shelf in the kitchen cabinets devoted entirely to storing the stickers. It fell to me to shred hundreds of gummy pages. The shredder even gummed up in protest.
I began to wonder why I was taking such precautions against identity theft. If someone were foolish enough to steal my identity from the address labels, the charities would surely find the thief.
My wife has far more of the address labels than I do because she used to feel guilty about using the labels and not sending a donation, until she realized the charity was selling her name to other charities, thus she’d get more solicitations with more address labels.
Once we even received an address label for Mr. and Mrs. Ada Duncan. Now that is carrying this gender labeling a bit far.
I always thought it was our loving personalities that created this self adhesive monster, but the other day my wife and I were playing cards with a four couple group and the topic of conversation around the card table was about what to do with all those address labels.
The conversation was triggered when someone commented on the clever design our hosts, Martin and Libby Manthe, had on the group score cards — a triangle with the letter M in the center. Libby said it came from one of the address labels the Manthes had received.
Everybody had an address label story to share. The wonder was that every mail delivery included a new batch of self adhesive address labels. The stories got wilder with each telling.
One person said they went on a cruise and swapped addresses with dining room table mates. One couple pulled out a sheet of address labels to share. At the county fair when every vendor is trying to give away some prize, it was noted that some people carry a sheet of address labels and rather than writing in the entry form, they simply plastered it with an address label.
It appears from my in-depth study, that charities are competing to see who can come up with the best design to attract the donor’s attention. At Christmas time the incoming labels all have a holiday theme. One batch I got this year even included gift tags to stick on presents.
Some years ago, in this column, I had a contest for the reader who received the most unsolicited catalogs. I had planned to hold a contest for the reader who got the most address labels, but after hearing the stories during the card game, it appears that people destroy their surplus address stickers by burning, shredding or throwing caution to the wind, just heaving them in the trash.
Besides, if I held a contest on sheer numbers, my wife would win and there would be accusations of an inside job. I will also have to eliminate my card playing foursome, because I am naming them judges in a contest that will not be based on record numbers, but on the best story about getting unsolicited address labels. Name names. Tell funny stories.
The prize? Two thousand address labels, of course.
No, no. The prize is a sweatshirt labeled: "Address Unknown, Return to Sender."
Send your entries to: Label Contest, P.O. Box 812, Roseburg, OR 97470.
(You didn’t think Bill Duncan was going to reveal his home address did you?)