Mail

There are those rare days when for some unknown reason your mail, even your e-mail is significantly more interesting than on other days. Today is such a day, so I thought I'd let you participate.

There are those rumours that the worst you can do to a parcel with fragile contents is to put "Fragile" stickers on it, because, the rumours say, those parcels are treated with "special" care to make sure the contents are broken once they arrive. It is probably for a similar reason that Amazon.co.uk placed the address sticker exactly where they did on this parcel containing a vinyl record:

Which is, right over the words "Please do not bend". I suppose that way at least no one got tempted.

Then there was this packet which upon closer inspection turned out to contain Volume One of "the new encyclopedia for Austria", which is apparently being issued now to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Austrian State Treaty in 1955 (no idea how an encyclopedia and military neutrality are connected, especially as our politicians are currently trying to get rid of the neutrality treaty anyway, but there you go).

It seems that they are sending out Volume 1, which covers letters "A" to "Ausr" free of charge to, well, possibly everybody. I thought at first I got it because I am a member of the Club Ö1, a discount scheme associated with an Austrian radio station whose journalists apparently participated in the making of this encyclopedia, but then my parents called and told me they also got it, and they are not members. They also told me that they were going to purchase the whole set.

I wonder: is there money in sending out free first volumes of encyclopedias just to make people buy the other nineteen volumes? And how many people will buy them?

In my mailbox at work I found this spam e-mail which was highly unusual in that it was not for some kind of pharmaceutical or pseudo-pharmaceutical or explicit product connected with human sexuality. In fact, it was for Christmas trees made of some kind of textile material.

Pointless, yes, but somehow refreshing.

Then there was this DVD set from another Amazon parcel that came with the sad realization that a TV series that I don't particularly care about is apparently significantly more popular than the one that I kind of like (albeit for its trashiness). At any rate, usually the old series is used to advertise the new one, not vice versa.

But the day was saved by the following e-mail, which announced that my visit at a wine tasting event last Sunday had resulted in an extremely pleasant and totally unexpected bonus:

Looks like I won in the prize draw that evening, the one which had taken place after I had already left. Nice. I think the prize was one or several bottles of wine, but I didn't really care to ask for the details.

I'm very much looking forward to getting that parcel. I just hope they don't forget to put a "Fragile" sticker on it. Or perhaps they'd rather not. Or should they?