Journal: News & Comment

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Detective work

It's a shame when people confuse pure written quantity with quality or persuasiveness.

Today I received something rare: spam that wasn't e-mail, but plain old postal snail mail. It's a semi-insane polemic against big unions here in British Columbia, called the GREED and POVERTY (GnP) News [sic].

While similar to the signs you sometimes see on sandwich boards worn by solitary people parading in front of courthouses and company headquarters, it shares many more things with common electronic spam of the "this injustice is too great to ignore -- I must spam people to show them how infuriated I am!!!" variety:

• It's way too big (four full legal-size sheets).
• It has a lousy, too-urgent title at the top of the first page: "Help---Help---Help---SOCIAL JUSTICE---Help---Help---Help."
• The typography is terrible. Lots of BIG BOLD LETTERS all glommed together with no proper spacing or indentation, lots of ----------lines of dashes---------- to set things off amid the mess, yellow highlighter across supposedly key pieces of text, and strange layout choices.
• It selectively quotes all sorts of statistics and articles (many cut-and-pasted from newspapers in various orientations).
• There are many parenthetical comments with UPPER CASE MESSAGES!!! including too many exclamation marks. As a bonus for being on paper, they are written in the few remaining margins, so that there is almost no white space left at all.
• It wastes resources, in this case by being only single-sided.
• There is no return address, either on the envelope or in the newsletter itself -- it simply requests that I "send copies to other sympathetic and supportive people" (assuming that I'm sympathetic and supportive).
• The cancellation on the stamp is basic, including no post office information or date that I could use to trace the letter.
• It is personally addressed to me (and my "family and friends"!) at the correct address, but there is a small error, in this case in the postal code.
• In sum, the whole thing is such a mess I have no inclination to read it at all.

I assume the sender saw a letter to the editor I had published in the Georgia Straight recently, and then looked up my name in the phone book. It's the price of fame, I suppose.

I'd guess that genuinely famous people must receive nutty mail all the time. And I suppose that I really should have been suspicious of the un-postmarked letter with no return address, in case it contained anthrax.

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