Mountains of Uselessness

I usually let my incoming (physical) mail stack up quite a bit before I pay attention to it. That may not always be a good thing when it comes to paying bills on time... I realized just now why I resist paying the bills. It's not the pain of actually paying the bill, but rather the hunting through mountains of crap mail to find the good stuff and real bills. The photo above shows three weeks of junk on the left, and the important stuff on the right (it's almost imperceptible).

It doesn't stop with the two or three "Pennysaver" fliers per week. Nor does it stop with the actual junk mail. Nor the credit card offer from United Airlines every week for the past three years! No, even when I open actual bills, there is more junk mail inside. My phone company keeps urging me to sign up for DSL service even though I tried them, their service quality was crap, and I canceled my account with them. Thank goodness my family doesn't send me junk mail too!

I probably get more than 500 pages of junk material per month. That's a whole ream of paper! In comparison about 20 pages of that is stuff valuable to me: letters from friends or important bills. If we are ever serious about becoming a "green" society, we really need to get rid of junk mail. With over 105 million households in the US, there are probably about 3 million tons of paper going to waste every year.

We talk about email "spam" filtering. I would really like to have physical junk mail filtering as well. But unlike spam which usually gets filtered at the receiving end, I think junk mail should be filtered at the sending end. I get so much repeat junk mail, it would make sense to have a little box on the envelope marked "⊗ RETURN TO SENDER, DON'T EVER SEND ME THIS CRAP AGAIN."

I realize that this is not a new topic, but I just had to vent for a moment. Now I know how Andy Rooney feels.