conspiracy theory: publicity stunt to help convince customers to forego physical letters and do everything online, then pounce on those who missed important notices in the digital noise
I don’t usually do the same mistake 55,000 times in a row if I’m overworked. Would have saved the company money if I did nothing at all if that’s how it’s going to be.
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This is like that deleted scene from the Harry Potter franchise in which Hogwarts owls bombard Harry’s household with notices of how much he still owes in tuition payments.
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I remember back in the 1970s when fuel prices spiked, a “what will they think of next” news story about a guy who installed a wood stove to heat his home, then got the biggest PO box he could and worked to get it on as many junk mail lists as possible. Pretty soon, junk mailers were heating his house for him, gratis.
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Heh, you just brought back one of my earliest childhood memories. Our big old Victorian house still had a coal furnace, and the kitchen wastebasket was reserved for burnable paper—cereal boxes, the newspaper, and yes, all the junk mail. The wastebasket itself was plastic, a lovely (to me) bright aqua color. When it got full my mom would take it down to the basement and empty it into the furnace. I would follow her down to watch—I was just little, and had to stand back. It was scary! Hot! Fire! One time when she opened the furnace door, the flames were roaring, and she went to empty the basket into the fire, but she lost her grip and she accidentally pitched the whole wastebasket into the flames. She managed to fish it out, but it was already partly melted and no longer usable. I remember that I was sad because I had really liked the color of it.
But yes, junk mail served to heat our house too (though not exclusively junk mail) and probably plenty of other homes as well, until all the coal furnaces were replaced. I don’t remember what year my folks had a natural-gas furnace put in—they were among the last in the neighborhood to switch, as I recall—but it wasn’t before I was big enough myself to be given the task of tossing the junk mail into the fire 
(btw this column gives a very good description of what it was like to heat with coal.)
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Hehe, IRL spamming
Great story, thanks for sharing.
When I bought my house, in the late 90s, it was heated by a boiler (probably vintage 1921) that had been converted to gas from coal. Basically all they did was pull out most of the firebox mechanism and put a big honkin’ gas flame there instead (plus control system). Oh, and they wrapped it in a a great deal of asbestos. The system was single-pipe steam, which is a joy to heat with (though not to pay for heating with) as long as it’s maintained correctly. It hadn’t been, for god knows how long. In the end we replaced the boiler, which also involved guys in moon suits all over the basement for asbestos removal. Anyway, when the coal-to-gas conversion was done, they had just left all the old guts in the corner of the basement, so we turned them into a “lost art of steam heating” display on the wall. The corner of the basement where they were stored was where the old coal bin had been, the walls were still covered with coal dust. I understand now where the custom of spring cleaning came from.
The place has been renovated in the last year or so, and the coal dust is gone and so’s the boiler (geothermal heat pump now) but the “lost art of steam heating” display lives on, joined now by one of the old radiators.
Anyway, I digress egregiously, but it’s a fun digression.
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