A friend of sent me a link last week that reminded me of a story from my days in Bloomington. After high school I got a job in a retail mailing shop – the kind of place you can make copies, pack and ship things, and rent a personal mail box. For years part of my morning duties included picking up and sorting mail for our boxholders.

The boxholders were a motley crew of legitimate business owners, RV-dwelling retirees, aspiring scam artists, and people with something to hide (porn, off-shore gambling accounts) from friends and family, but they shared a near-universal disdain for junk mail. Fourth-class mail was a hefty portion of the daily haul, sometimes making up a quarter or more of the total volume.

Many of our boxholders explicitly told us to toss the AOL promotional discs, the NetZero offers, the letters pleading with them to invest in gold BECAUSE GOLD WILL NEVER LOSE ITS VALUE! Other boxholders never saw their junk mail because they came by so infrequently that we had to sift through the overflowing pile of crap just to make sure we could fit the important stuff, like child support overdue notices, in their box.

At any rate, after several years I left that job on good terms and moved to Bloomington to finish the degree I’d been slowly working towards at Ivy Tech and IUPUI. The following summer I needed to come up with some extra cash in addition to my bouncing gig so I headed out to the mall and picked some low-hanging fruit. The next week I started working at the Bloomington franchise of said mailing shop and found myself learning a new lot of boxes and their corresponding weirdos.

That summer I started sorting red paper envelopes that seemed to contain CDs. Mixed in with AOL trial offers and NetZero teases, I figured these red envelopes were part of another irritating ISP’s marketing campaign. I sorted them into boxes when there was room but as more and more arrived I started tossing them in the trash can. But when I started throwing them out they began multiplying like Mogwai in a swimming pool. I couldn’t make sense of it but ultimately I didn’t care – it was junk mail as far as I could tell. I threw hundreds upon hundreds of those red paper envelopes out over the course of the summer and never gave them a second thought when I quit to start fall term.

That autumn I was sitting in a friends’ house when I noticed one of those same envelopes on her coffee table. I told her that I’d been throwing them out all summer and asked her why she had one. She told me that the envelope was from Netflix, which I knew, but it’s some stupid internet service company, right? No, she said, they are the new web-based DVD rental service.

I held up the envelope, thought of those piles of discs sitting atop unwanted solicitations and catalogs in a 32-gallon Rubbermaid trash can and the curious faces of boxholders who never received their movies no matter how many times they complained to Netflix and I laughed, and laughed, and laughed.