Did you know that the United States Postal Service (USPS) can email you images of what pieces of mail you’ll get later in the day?  Every morning, ’round 8 or so, I get a message from my friendly Postmaster that has a bunch of Xerox coper-era jpg’s of my mail.  I said to Emily even this morning, “there’s a bill coming from [redacted] in the mail today.”  It’s pretty neat, you know, to be able to spy on yourself like that.

It makes me wonder how long until they just open the mail, and send me images of what’s inside, foregoing the whole walk to the mailbox.

Then I think to myself “well, if they can send me an image of the correspondence itself, why not just write something back to the sender, scan it, and email it back to them?” which is a great example of both overthinking and reinventing the wheel.  We call that “email.”  The “e” stands for electronic.  Kids don’t use it.

Listen, I still get an analog copy of the newspaper every morning.  The ceremony of finding it in the driveway/lawn/snow is something I look forward to.  Reading actual print on paper is a delight.  Screens are so… everywhere.  Having a whole paper to read makes me want to at least skim the whole thing, if not read many articles from top to bottom.  No invasive ads, no notifications, no rabbit trails.  I even do the crossword.  What am I?  Old?

Perhaps.

What about you?  Do you read a print paper?  Do you get the email from the post office?  By the way, it’s called “Informed Delivery” which sounds like a James Bond movie or a pamphlet at a Lamaze class.  If you want, here’s the link (to the mail thing, not the other stuff I said: https://informeddelivery.usps.com/box/pages/intro/start.action

Or, you can google it. You can google everything I’ve mentioned.