I called the bank to change my address


I remember when I moved back to Alabama from Tampa, FL., I called the bank to change my address. When I told them who I was, the person I was speaking with said, “Oh, you’re the one who sends the beautiful cards! We are going to miss you! We fight over who gets your cards!”
That just stunned me that I was “the ONE”. I, at the time, sold things on Ebay, as well as working 60-80 hours a week on the graveyard shift. It was impossible to make a special trip to the bank to deposit the checks I received in my eBay dealings so I just mailed them with a fancy check and usually put a kind note in with the card. I assumed the cards went to many different people and wasn’t that big of a deal, but they knew who I was, and they fought over my cards! That made me happy.
I meant to continue sending them just random cards, but I had become disabled and stamps and cards were expensive and hard to come by then. And now 15 years have passed by. But, at the time, I remember being stunned that such a small thing meant so much to the people who received the cards and deposited the checks at the bank. It brightened their day and they got to keep the cards.
They were just $3 or so cards I picked up on Sundays when I went out on my off day. I enclosed a deposit slip and the checks I had received that week with my eBay sales. This was a long time ago. I imagine everyone does PayPal now. But it was fun at the time.
I’ve been working on clearing off a spot to make it where I can do “snail mail” again. I used to be big on pen pals and wrote lots of letters. I have an award from the Governor of Alabama in 1992 for writing more letters than anyone in the State for the Christmas campaign for mail for the military for “Any Service Person” letters. That was very rewarding, writing letters, baking cookies, sending gifts to service people all over the globe fighting for our country. I used to love to send chocolates, pieces of gum, any kind of “tuck-ins” in the mail, anything to make people feel special.
With the military Christmas mail, I would buy Reader’s Digests for 10cents each at library bookstores and neatly tear out the page where the military jokes are and would include that in with their Christmas card. So, they would get a Christmas card, the Reader’s Digest military jokes’ page, sometimes a sticker of a piece of gum… just whatever I could find to “tuck in” the card. After 9/11, they changed everything so nothing could be personalized anymore, but it was so much fun there for years. – Joni