Tell it to my jammed mailbox.

Week before last it was all charities. Last week, no charities but lots of mail anyway.

The same Chase mailing arrives about every two weeks.
The OE is glossy and several shades of blue. It concerns something called Chase Sapphire without a hint as to what a) Chase or b) Sapphire might be.

Chase just got to Florida a few months ago and I guess they assume everyone already knows it’s a bank. There’s some gobbledygook OE copy about points. Inside is a bad letter with more babbling about points and about me being preapproved (not quite true) for Sapphire which, it turns out, is a card. What kind of card? Doesn’t say but credit card would be a good guess.

The letter is in an unreadable small sans serif font and signed in a weak black, though there’s a lot of blue elsewhere on the page.

Worst of all is that, although I can earn 10,000 bonus points, double points and a point for every dollar I spend, there is no clue about how many points I need to claim one of the many opulent rewards.

An incoherent mailing but it must be working or Chase would stop sending it.

Time and Florida Trend magazines sent me the same mailing at the same time.
I haven’t been able to read Time for the last quarter century, and I imagine a lot of other people feel the same way because I can now get 85 issues for about a quarter each.

This mailing comes in an envelope that says merely DO NOT BEND although it contains nothing that would suffer in the slightest from bending. There’s no letter, just a list of features and an attached order form. The Florida Trend mailing has the same DO NOT BEND on the OE and the same format in the non-letter/order form. The return address is in California! Amazingly bad, both of them.

The disgraceful New York Times continues to write insisting that it is a newspaper. No teaser copy on the OE, no anything but the familiar Gothic logo and the presorted indicia.

Inside is some hilarious copy, especially in two fake-ish (and unattributed) testimonials that are nonetheless between inverted commas as if someone had actually uttered the words. One says “… I always find something that surprises me” and I imagine that’d be true for people who get their news from actual journalists. The other says “Nothing beats relaxing with the paper on the weekend.” Nothing? Not your first born, winning the lottery, being in Paris on a spring day? This is foolish, self-defeating puffery. The non-letter is signed in black ink.

I’m assuming National Geographic’s good old fashioned 6” x 9” mailings continue to work because they keep coming, sometimes three or four different ones a week. Good luck to them.

Wachovia’s selling accident disability insurance. Wachovia’s a bank.

The Metropolitan Museum’s latest catalog is lovely, lots of gold on a black cover. Cool stuff, I suppose. I usually buy a few things from them at Christmas and this is a sensible followup.

Hammacher Schlemmer, in case you don’t know the company, sells all kinds of interesting gadgets. My favorite source of Christmas presents. Prices in the current catalog range from stuff that costs $39 to a $1,400 Swiss Army Knife with 87 different tools and a $30,000 big glass orb with a complicated version of that game you tilt this way and that to roll a ball-bearing past holes, walls and obstacles. Another sensible followup to Christmas buying.

The catalogs are terrific, professional, engaging. The direct mail packages are ghastly things written (and/or approved) by people who have nothing to say, contempt for the recipient and no knowledge whatsoever of how to engage people. They couldn’t sell cold beer in a ballpark on a hot Sunday afternoon.

I guess the pros are working for charities because those mailings were all excellent.