Rusty Saber: Junk mail can require a wheelbarrow

My wife and I paid a severe price for being away for two weeks mail.

"Accumulated" doesn't adequately describe the scene; momentous, mammoth mountain of mail is a better description, albeit harder to quickly repeat several times. Whatever it is called, a heap of mail lay in wait on the dining room table.

An entire forest of trees must have given their lives so this mess could be ours. If you are like me, you don't think about how much mail comes every day. I know there's always a pile of mail crammed into the box, but it takes an accumulation over several days to envision just how many mailing lists have our names on them. An 18-wheeler could have dumped this mess on us. I have always marveled at the ability of the post office to deliver the mail so efficiently. If everybody accumulates mail the way we do, I'm not only impressed. I'm aghast that the post office can carry it all, let alone get it to the right addresses.

We must be on every mailing list in the free world. If there is any junk mail sender out there that doesn't have our names, I don't know who it may be. Within this mound of mail were bills, a few magazines, and some reminders of meetings we needed to know about. Beyond these wanted and or needed items (we didn't actually want bills, but we needed them), we were awash with junk mail, mail we neither wanted nor needed. Not a single personal letter was in the lot. I remember when letters from friends and family filled mail boxes. Like the telephone, the mailbox has become a conduit for unwanted sales pitches.

My wife has the businesslike patience to systematically deal with such junk. If it were left up to me, I would probably throw my hands up and dump the whole mess in the recycle bin, thus missing what few important items may have been lurking among the junk. A scintillating contest materialized between ads for credit cards, catalogs and requests for donations. After a epic race, it was credit cards by a nose.

I'm not often astounded. Oh, sure, I may at times be bewildered, but rarely am I astounded.

The glut of credit card ads flowing daily into the mailbox astounds me. These ads all offer low introductory interest rates, followed later by much higher rates. In essence, they say: "First, we will entrap you with low rates; once we have you, we will shaft you with high rates." It's hard to pass on such a deal. On a given day, two or three such ads appear. Let them accumulate for a couple of weeks and it's obvious: They multiply like rabbits.

Finishing right behind credit card ads, locked in a dead heat, were catalogs, a lot of catalogs, and requests for donations, a lot of them, too. Actually, catalogs can be interesting to thumb through. Alas, after 50 or so catalogs, thumbing loses its appeal.

Some catalogs come because you are alive and have a mailbox. Others come because you have ordered something from a catalog; you are doomed to forever reside in catalog limbo, awash in catalogs. If there is something not available by catalog, I don't know what it might be. These guys must trade mailing lists like the New York Stock Exchange trades stocks.

Somehow, someone's computer believes my wife and I are the parents of a new baby this will happen at the exact moment that an elephant jumps over the moon. Baby-supply catalogs and fliers like you wouldn't believe fill our mailbox.

I don't even want to think about the number of catalogs that would have piled up had we been away during the Christmas season. Christmas brings on catalogs like dogs bring out fleas at a picnic in August. I'm a middleman between the catalog companies and the recycling center. Donate money to a charitable organization and your mailbox will never be empty. Requests from worthy causes that you might like to support will choke the mailbox; no one can support them all. These national organizations sell mailing lists to the point where you end up on all of them. They must spend more money asking for money than they receive.

A lot of trees give the last full measure of devotion.

Oops, I must be going. I need to take a wheelbarrow out to pick up the mail.

(Joe McAdoo is former chairman of the communication department at Drury University and a Springfield public relations consultant.)