Last week after the training ended, I spent the majority of my Sunday and Monday cleaning the house and boxing my belongings. As part of that process, I took some time to sort through my mail (snail mail, not e-mail), which had been allowed to accumulate throughout the term. Of course, during the weeks, I would take a look at anything that seemed important. But most of the time, I don’t receive anything in the mail except bank statements, credit card bills, and junk. If I know something is junk, I’ll toss it, but I usually just file everything else away in a drawer.
You wouldn’t think that it requires too much time to go through the mail. It should probably only take a few minutes right? Or not. With a large stack like the one I had, the minutes add up. I think I wasted between 1 to 2 hours working on it.
One issue of my hard labor was a collection of organized statements arranged neatly by account and date. (Yes. I just might have OCD.) A second issue was a small mound of torn-up credit card offers.
Sometimes I wonder if credit card companies have a thing against trees. Think about it. I get a notice that I’m preapproved for a credit card from the same bank/company every two weeks or so. (It’s like they don’t know when or how to stop.) And assuming I’m not the only person receiving those offers (which I believe is a very high probability), that’s about six pages of paper and two envelopes per month multiplied by the hundreds of thousands of people in the US. (I assume credit card companies want every single person to own a card, including your average toddler, so they can slap them with a hefty interest charge whenever they fail to make a payment on the $1,000 pacifier they bought with their Visa.) That’s a whole lot of wasted paper. And that’s just one credit card company.
At this rate, a small forest is probably dying every month.