FCW’s got an good story today (Your inbox is full) on how Congress is coping with the flood of email it gets. The main problem according to the report (Communicating with Congress: How Capitol Hill is Coping with the Surge in Citizen Advocacy) seems to be that much of the mail smells like spam. And the letters from grandmas whose homes are in the way of the new state highway are getting lost in the deluge. Inboxes are filling up with the results of letter writing/emailing campaigns organized by special interest groups that are targeting a specific legislator or bill: support of farm subsidies, Social Security, the anti-flag burning amendment, etc. Unfortunately, the legislators’ staffers have to answer most correspondence with a letter – you know the kind on paper that goes in an envelope, gets a stamp (or do they use franking?) and gets delivered to the constituent's mailbox. What a waste of time, money and good people; I’d be tearing my hair out.
What a treat it must be to get a REAL letter from a grandma or even a couple dozen similar but sweet notes from Mrs. Elliott’s fourth grade social studies class. And then there are the ones that deserve special mention: the bizarre letter from the odd constituent. My husband’s first job was answering constituent mail in the legislative services office in Harrisburg. There were letters from people ranting about litter (“the whole area is infested with despoilers�), suggested improvements at restaurants (special ‘out-of-service’ signs to be placed on coffee urn spigots that were full of soapy water) and this snippet from a eight-page handwritten letter (much of which is too callous to repeat here). The constituent is complaining about his neighbors.
Their two black cats track all over our car – get in the lower part of my house, dig out flowers (to do their business) lettuce, corn potatoes (on top of the ground) beets, onions, peppers, radishes, beans, pickles, anything put in freshly worked ground. You have record of all this and a thousand times more, and continue public harass me with your cussed power of the office. I have these explosive notes for the “Law� which is non available according to you. This cannot “wait for one (1) year� like S----- said (cooling off period). I want action quickly before school. She’s not fit to be with kids in school.
That’d be a change of pace, wouldn’t it? When I used to answer FCW’s webmaster email, I occasionally got off-topic (or so badly expressed) missives that were pretty funny. My favorite was the guy who who’d seen FCW’s coverage on states’ criminal databases. He asked how he could get onto the Indiana sex offenders site. I knew he wanted the URL, but still…. What emails have you gotten a smile out of?
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