Return to sender.

In response to the people who have mentioned receiving or sending random or annoying things in the post, I have a good one for you.

I used to run the post room for a large regional brewery a few years back. This brewery used to employ a mailing house to regularly send out huge advertising mailshots for its hotel wing. Many of these frequently come back, having been sent to the wrong address, or to people who had moved away, or even died. When they came back, we had to send them upstairs to the relevant department to have the details removed from the database, but since this was considered a low-priority job, it would often be forgotten by the people who were in charge of it. As a result, we would often get mail returned with messages scrawled on the envelopes by people at the effected address to the effect that this was the fifth, tenth or even twentieth piece of mail they had returned, and could we please take them off of the database.

One person had a great wrinkle on this, however. After returning ten pieces of mail for someone who had moved away years ago, they took the letter and put it in an envelope with the brewery's return address on it, but no postage, so we had to pay for it. And then, just to make sure we got the message, they put a roof slate in, along with a note stating that the next time they got a letter for this person, they would return it with two roof slates.

Their address got removed from the database pretty quickly after we delivered the slate and letter upstairs on a silver tray...

On the junk mail topic...

I like to send back my junk mail in the prepaid envelopes. I try to make sure to fold it so that it's thicker than the post offices cheap letter rate. If you take all the stuff they send you and the original envelope, you can normally fold it into quarters and make quite a bulge.

I don't know if the PO bother totting up these extras or not. Roof slates certainly sound like a good idea, but I doubt they'd fit in the prepaid envelope.

I do normally have the kindness to write "NO THANKS" across the application form in black marker pen. Just so they realise that I don't actually want a new credit card/whatever when they've opened it.