Old mailing lists never die

[jhetley]

They don't even fade away.

Noted with amusement, one piece of mail this morning to the business address appended "AIA" to my name.  I dropped AIA membership at least ten years ago, due to high cost and irrelevance to my type of architecture.

Of course, that doesn't beat our personal record of a bit of political mail addressed to my father, received 25 years after his death...

Comments

[sclerotic-rings.livejournal.com]

Heh. I actually have fun with my mailing lists, mostly because I stopped using my middle initial with magazine subscriptions and bill payments five years ago. Not only do I know someone's working with a really old list if the query uses my middle initial, but I can usually guess the source for the list. While most magazines take the hint and stop bugging me to resubscribe after two years, I'm still getting regularly quarterly subscription offers from Communications Arts, Comic Buyer's Guide, and Asimov's, and I haven't had anything to do with any of them in nearly a decade.

Of course, what's really funny is that I still get the occasional movie press pass from one of the local publicity companies, even though I let them know in no uncertain terms that I had quit film criticism and didn't have any interest in returning. Even funnier is that they're all addressed to me care of Sci-Fi Universe, which died nine years ago this summer. I call to let them know that I'm no longer writing, and I get another pass six weeks later.

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

We can often trace mailing lists to the source, using typos that perpetuate and propagate through space and time. Also, Wife has one of those gender-ambiguous first names, so that stuff addressed to _Mr._ Wifename finds the trash bin rather faster than average...

[sclerotic-rings.livejournal.com]

The Dallas Morning News is still run by troglodytes, but the idiocy pervaded all levels back in the Nineties, right after its owners bought out and shut down the Dallas Times Herald. A lot of individuals who had no problem subscribing to both papers suddenly decided that they didn't need a paper at all when slapped with a monopoly, so the Morning News went berserk in an attempt to shore up its ever-decreasing readership. Since the paper's management had been caught in all sorts of scams in the previous twenty years, including delivering papers to empty fields and dumping mass quantities in apartment complex laundromats to goose subscription numbers (for which the CEO of Belo is now embroiled in a class action lawsuit by the paper's advertisers), the idea at first was to play nice and look for subscribers one phone call at a time.

Their mistake the first time was using what some clueless idiot in Marketing thought would be a great phone script. North Texas may be way behind the rest of the country as far as blatant and obvious sexism, but even the Ranch Style Beans company changed its slogan from "Husband pleasin'" to "Appetite pleasin'" in the mid-Eighties. That said, even I wasn't expecting the phone call one afternoon asking "May I please talk to the man of the house?" I naturally responded "Give me a second, and I'll get her" and then hung up. The dumbass actually called back, so I told him why I'd hung up, and did the same thing to the next four solicitors who called with that same pitch. I mean, I know I have a voice that Lovecraft would have described as "a raucous squawk", but still.

[wcg.livejournal.com]

political mail addressed to my father, received 25 years after his death...

I feel sure there are registered Democrats in Chicago who have been dead longer and still get regular political mail. Including voter registrations!

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

Well, our Chicago contacts would be more than 50 years back...

[allaboutm-e.livejournal.com]

I don't even want to think about how doomed Da Boy, who somehow got listed with the AARP at 11 tender years of age is ... he gets crap all the time, even though theoretically his information has been removed from the source lists... :(