Columnists
The old-fashioned way
Two old-fashioned methods of communication— the typewritten letter and the handwritten letter—are making quite a comeback. The typewriter has been endorsed by celebrities such as Tom Hanks, and a documentary movie (California Typewriter) has been made about people who swear by the typewriter as a creative tool. And you can’t escape the deluge of paeans to the handwritten letter. Creating a letter makes you feel good, and makes the recipient feel valued. In both cases, you are personally invested in the enterprise.
However, communications of both types need to be entrusted to the postal delivery system. Normally, that system delivers mail efficiently, but every once in a while you hear a horror story about less than prompt delivery that makes you shake your head in disbelief. I have a couple of them to share.
The French postal system took in a letter sent from Paris in 1790 to a person in the village of Seix, and delivered it instead to the village of Saix, some 150 miles away from its intended destination. The postal office in Saix had never heard of Seix, and could not find the address or the addressee in its bailiwick (digital tracking wasn’t introduced until after the end of the 18th century). So it did what most of us would do in the same situation: stuck it in a drawer and forgot about it. The letter sat in that drawer until it was discovered by an archivist a few years ago.
So in 2010—some 220 years on—the mayor of Saix hand-delivered the letter to the mayor of Seix, saying it was “about time” the letter was put in the hands of the intended recipient. Ironically, the letter was from the French government turning down a request from Seix to be a provincial capital—thereby proving that they weren’t necessarily a bunch of rubes in the Paris and Saix post offices. Why should they be expected to have known about Seix if it was just some provincial backwater?
I hope the people of Seix are not holding anything against the people of Saix. Any small town worth its salt would have taken other steps to make itself the leading candidate to be a provincial capital, despite being given the cold shoulder by Paris. And it would be tragic to think that people in Seix were sitting back in, say, 1860 and saying to themselves “well, I’m sure we’ll hear from the people in Paris any day now; after all, they’ve had the letter for 100 years already.”
(Give the French credit for their droll sense of postal humour. In December 2013, the government sent a census form addressed to “Napoleon Bonaparte” at the emperor’s birthplace at 3 Rue Saint Charles, Ajaccio, Corsica. The person now living at that address rejected the letter and sent it back with the inscirption “Died in 1821—please forward to Saint Peter.”)
The official (Guiness Book) record for the longest postal delay is held by the Royal Mail in the United Kingdom. A reply to a Boxing Day party invitation (“Dear Percy, Many thanks for the invitation, be delighted. See you on the 26th December. Regards, Buffy”) was sent in 1919 and was eventually delivered to the right address in 2008—in a plastic bag with a note apologizing for the condition of the letter, but making no mention of the delay.
Percy and Buffy had long ago vanished from the scene and we are left to our own imagination to fill in the blanks. Did they meet up anyway on Boxing Day, get married, have children and live to a ripe old age? Or perhaps the outcome was more complex. Did Percy, thinking Buffy had snubbed him, turn his attentions elsewhere? Did Buffy show on the appointed day and discover she had been uninvited. Was there a scene? It’s enough fodder for a six-part period drama on Masterpiece Theatre.
But those stories shouldn’t be enough to dissuade you from using the postal system. What’s the worst that can happen? Your life may be ruined by an unconscionable delay, but you’ll have contributed to a story that will be told for years.
You could entrust your message to email, but that has its perils as well. Recent events have reminded us that our personal information may easily be bought and sold by those up to no good. And our email communications can easily go astray. Consider the Minneapolis man who had arrived in Florida a day before his wife. With one small keystroke mistake, he sent an email to a woman in Houston whom he had never met, instead of to his wife. The woman had just buried her Baptist minister husband. The email read “ To: My Loving Wife. Subject: I’ve Arrived. I know you’re surprised to hear from me. They have computers here now and you are allowed to send emails to your loved ones. I’ve just arrived and have been checked in. I’ve seen that everything has been prepared for your arrival tomorrow. Looking forward to seeing you then! Hope your journey is as uneventful as mine was. P. S. Sure is freaking hot down here!!”
Must be a true story: I got it off the Internet.
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