Unable to Forward [update]
The letters to Bantam’s Detective Book Club and Pocket Books came back today. I’m sure the mailman thought that I only had it coming when he trudged up the stairs and slipped them through the mail slot. I mean what sensible person would mail something addressed to someone in Rosalyn, Long Island, New York? With what appears to be two-digit postal code?
I can’t say I didn’t expect it, but still, I could have done without the snickering.
update
On the 22nd the letter to Pocket Books came back. Yesterday the one addressed to the New American Library was returned. I confess to a harboring a certain absurd belief that somewhere someone would have done something to help a watery-eyed and unabashed optimist with a taste for out-of-date Sci-Fi. Sigh. Four out of four may constitute a one-hundred-percent return rate but at least I can cling to the knowledge that it’s not a statistically significant sample. Still, it seems I’ve demonstrated only that the exceptionally unlikely is just that.
They say no experiment is a complete failure. Well, yeah. At least I got my $3.20 back.
man. that’s too bad I was hoping you’d get something. ah well that just goes to show you…never try to do anything cool.
No, no. This isn’t how it is supposed to go.
See, there’s this one guy at the post office, right. He’s been there forever, but he’s not broken or tired. He still finds romance in the USPS.
He picked up your letters one evening, late. He noticed their anachronistic addresses and, though he knew he shouldn’t, held them to the light. He couldn’t quite make out exactly what was going on inside those envelopes, but he figured there was a reason for what you were trying to do – and it entertained him, made him smile.
He clocked out and set himself down at the computer terminal with your letters piled neatly beside a short stack of Newman-Os (he keeps the package in his locker and has two every day at the end of his shift). He googled Pocket Books and found the imprint on the Simon and Schuster site. He called customer service, said he had some paper mail for them, and got an address.
Instead of the yellow label, he affixed a white one to the front of your letter, and wrote out the new address by hand – the address with a five-digit zipcode.
The letter arrives in New York, doesn’t it?
It arrives and, just maybe, some intern with a sense of humor opens it…
Isn’t that…isn’t that how it goes?
J9, you really have a gift.
Eckhart, you, too. I am enjoying reading about your experiments.