Christopher L. Jorgensen
PO Box 546
Ames, IA 50010

January 25, 2020

Postal Museum
15-20 Phoenix Place
London
WC1X 0DA
England

Dear Postal Museum,

​First off, let me tell you how much I like getting mail! It’s like my third favorite thing ever. It ranks right up there with food and money. I just love making the daily trek to my PO Box to see what missives people have sent me today. I love the idea of how slow the mail moves. I mean, I am going to mail this letter tomorrow, the 25th of January, and I bet it’ll take at least a week to get to you! I know that seems fast, but there was a time when such a letter would have taken months to arrive by steamship! But I bet you knew that already. Now, compare that to email, and that’s the problem with the world these days. Everyone is in such a hurry! No one takes the time to slow down, write out an actual letter, to address an envelope, put a stamp on it and drop it into a mail pickup box. Best kids these days can manage it to hit a button labeled “send.” Heck, half the time they don’t even bother doing that. They just text each other. They got nothing to say and they say a lot of it! I bet if texts cost actual money like letters do they would send a lot fewer texts.

Sorry if I am coming off like a curmudgeon, but I just don’t think kids see the mail in the same way as those of us who grew up before the internet. There were always surprises in the mail: Return address labels from a charity my mother had given a donation. Birthday and Christmas cards. Adult magazines for my uncle. Pretty much never anything for me if you didn’t count my uncle’s magazines, but as I got older I started to get my own mail. Mostly bills, but they still had my name on the envelope: Christopher L. Jorgensen! They pretty much proved I mattered to someone, even if it was just a bill collector or marketer.

I’d love to come to your museum someday, but I doubt it’ll be any time soon. I’d love to go through old boxes of historical archived mail and pretend I was the recipient, but I bet you don’t let just anyone do that, do you?

Sincerely,

Christopher L. Jorgensen

p.s. ​Sorry about Brexit. That sucks.