Something came in the mail looking so official that I knew it wasn’t official. Up in the return corner of the envelope it declared it was from “The Offices of RECORDS OF DECLARATION/ DISBURSEMENTS DIVISION -National Correspondences Official Records”.
The what? Of course, with such a ridiculously worded and long title with words like “official” and “records” and “national” it very well could have been from the government.
And across the middle of the envelope it clearly state that it was “Confidential Mail Enclosed”, with an order for the postmaster to “Please Deliver Immediately” this obviously pre-sorted bulk mail piece.
Through the addressee window I could see it was for me “Or Current Resident”. So much for confidentiality!
These things amuse me, so I opened it.
Gasp! It was my winner’s notice! Right there was my name printed on old, roll-out carbon copy computer paper, with a verification in number that was time sensitive! And a winning number! And a thing that looked like a check, but clearly stated “This is Not a Check” for $2,436.67.
Prizes! I could get $15,000 Instant Cash, or $1,000 instant cash! Or I could select from a few gift cards that had the words “Up To” in microscopic print beside large three-digit amounts, which legally allows awarding $1 gift cards. Of course, odds of winning were posted in tiny, faint typeface.
The document even had “authorization initials” of an upper case D, and what looked like two backward sixes or loopy lower case O’s, which spelled out DOO — what I totally thought about this piece of mail from Florida in behalf of an Arkansas dealership.
All I had to do to claim my prize was to report in person to register at an auto dealership —selling five brands— an hour away “this week only”, and no purchase was necessary. Except I couldn’t go on Sunday when the dealership is “closed to restock”. (So many new cars are rolling in these days…) Part of me wanted to go down there waving the confidential mail and overreact by screaming excitedly, “I won! I won!” Then I would have Grown Child come in and snatch the mail from my hands and say she is “Or Current Resident” and wants to claim the prize. We would then have a big fake fight to see what management would do, but leave before they called the cops.
Do these mass mailings actually work? I guess they do, or they wouldn’t keep showing up in our mailboxes so that people will show up at car dealerships. It seems appropriate that mailboxes have red flags.
When I’m teaching, I have my students look for the red flags that literary characters should have heeded. Part of it is for the literary understanding, and part of it is to get them in the habit of looking for the red flags in life as they go off after graduation.
It isn’t always the young who fail to see the red flags. We all have either not recognized them or have ignored them for some reason. Some flags are small, but some are huge. Such is the case in the podcast The Lady Vanishes, which is documenting a woman’s continuing years long search for her mother who went missing in 1997. As her own research gains the help of Australia television and internet sleuths, they hone in on one man who appears to have been a serial romantic scammer of middle aged lonely women, all while he was married and using multiple aliases over decades.
This smooth talking guy would ask them to not tell grown children they were leaving with him, to sell their home and put the money in a joint account with him, or to let him take valuables to be appraised or stored.
One woman was embarrassed to admit that she had lost around $70,000 to this guy! One woman was left alone and broke in Bali. Others reported near misses with him because they, or family members, finally got suspicious about his bragging about being a poisons expert. One of the common threads in all these was that he wanted them all to get a liver scan before they left with him!
That makes the fake- check, guaranteed winner, confidential “or current resident” mail not so sketchy.
