reminiscing about mail.
We also did a lot of neat stuff with our mail. I wanted each package we sent to be a treat for the recipient, even if it just meant having some unique-looking stuff on the envelope. I wanted our packages to be memorable somehow.
Sandy found this rubber stamp of a camel at a craft store. It cost about two dollars. We picked up a nifty purple ink pad, and from that point on, every package or letter from Dromedary had a dromedary on it somewhere. For regular envelopes, we’d stamp it once. For packages that contained actual music in them, we stamped the hell out of them, on the fronts and backs of the packages.
Sandy found this sticker in a catalog of cheapo toys and gifts for doctors and dentists. There are actually companies that make these catalogs, the doctor’s office can buy all sorts of cheap crap to give to kids when their appointments are done.
She thought it would be cool to slap a “No Cavity Club” on our packages, too. I have no idea why, but we did. And it was kinda cool – there was really no rhyme or reason to anything we did – dentist stickers on our envelopes, dumbass ads that made no sense, it was just fun.
This is a “flip frog.” It works kind of like a tiddlywink – it’s made of cheap plastic, and if you look at the frog’s ass, there’s sort of a little tab at the end. If you push down on the tab and then slide your finger off the end, the frog jumps – kind of like a frog does.
Sandy found these in the dentist catalog as well, and bought a huge bag for, like, a couple dollars (it’s incredible how amazingly cheap these doctors’ toys are). They came in all different colors. Whenever somebody bought something from us through the mail, we’d toss a few of these flip frogs in with the package.
Just our way of saying “ribbit.”
We also got these rubber erasers with drawings of various animals on them. They came in all different shapes. There were camels, which is why we bought them, but you couldn’t just buy the camels – you had to buy a big bag of rubber animal erasers.
Whenever somebody bought something from us, they’d get a camel eraser in the package, along with the flip frogs and the camel stamps and the cavity club sticker. Eventually we ran out of camels and started throwing in whatever other animals we had. Thankfully we don’t need to build an ark for rubber erasers because I did not save two of everything – these two unfortunate bastards are the only remaining erasers I saved.
~ by Al on July 28, 2009.
Posted in background, stories
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