The agony

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The next time that you receive a piece of mass mail in your mailbox, I want you to hold it in your hands. I want you to caress it, and turn it over, and draw your finger along its edges. I want you to admire the way that it has been sealed with care for your benefit.

Because if you are thinking that the company that sent it had a machine do all the work, then you are wrong.

YOU ARE WRONG.

The possibility exists that the company that sent you that piece of mass mail did so via their temp-receptionist, a girl in a pencil skirt with a very expensive education and many questions about her potential. She might be wearing high heels that are running her rapidly down the road toward bunions. Perhaps she is working on a countertop surface that is unusually low, and therefore, bending at the waist to seal each envelope.

And then reinforcing the seal with Scotch tape, since the glue isn’t doing it’s job.

She might have close to 200 booklets to weigh individually, since they are of varying sizes. This may take her several hours – hours of carefully NOT bending the corners of the booklets, and carefully NOT putting the letter in the wrong envelope, and carefully NOT letting the heaping stacks of papers topple to the floor. Devotedly. Lovingly. Just short of kissing with tongue.

And she might have woken up this morning with a stiff neck and sore shoulders and a need for a massage that she will seek in any way possible. Don’t massage schools need “subjects”?

I have an idea: you can pay me $20 to rub my shoulders.

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8 Comments

  1. kristy on April 10, 2008 at 9:57 AM

    awww.

  2. Jason Michael on April 10, 2008 at 12:15 PM

    I will never hastily throw out any more mass mail.

  3. Greta on April 10, 2008 at 12:23 PM

    Eeesh.

    Come back to Seattle and work for Brooks. We have a masseuse that comes in on Thursdays. Her name is Bonnie. :)

    She definitely makes us pay HER though.

  4. I am Kate Maxwell and home is in on April 10, 2008 at 3:38 PM

    i concur… while getting mass mailings may be unfortunate, sending them out is even worse.

  5. Anonymous on April 10, 2008 at 5:48 PM

    massage schools DO need test subjects… but take that with a word of caution ;).
    ~Diana

  6. Valerie on April 11, 2008 at 8:54 AM

    I am totally with you about the mass mailings! I have SO been there, and in fact I was in our mail room yesterday afternoon taping a stack of packets closed and I chuckled thinking of you and your lovely Temptress duties.

    Also! I was checking my statcounter this morning and I thought you’d be interested to know that someone found me by searching “Maundering Pondering.” (You are on the list of blogs we read.)

    So hopefully this poor lost soul was eventually directed to the correct blog they were looking for!

  7. Sarah Kate on April 11, 2008 at 12:48 PM

    You must google “Massage Schools and Nashville, TN.” This will lead you to plenty of masseuses (sp?) in training just longing for some tensed up shoulders. My body would be a case study were I to drag myself in there right now.
    In the meantime, I recommend laying on a tennis ball. It’s heaven.

    Hurt so good…

  8. Andrea on April 14, 2008 at 7:08 AM

    Hey Annie! Thanks for the comment on our blog :)

    I work for a non-profit, so I know EXACTLY what you mean about the mass mailings. So much love (and by love I mean painstaking care) goes into those dang mass mailings…and to know that most people just throw them away…sigh.

    Oh well. Go ahead with your bad self.

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