By Shaun Tumpane
Laguna Woods Globe columnist
Did you ever notice that interesting mail is all but extinct. Did you ever notice that? (Shout-out to Andy Rooney.)
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I’m not talking about the thousands of emails with which we all are bombarded thanks to meta, data mining, robophishing, and/or every company that drowns me with 47 emails from purveyors of golf shoes just because I was curious only once about a pair a friend was wearing who swore they made him play better golf. (The dumbest part was that I actually believed him.)
No, I’m talking snail mail. We receive a weekly sales and coupon insert that for years now has not been accompanied by a newspaper. Without a fireplace, the only value such kindling-adjacent material has is if I’m in the mood for soon-to-go-bad avocados marked down at Staters, which, of course, I am every 5th of Notever.
The far and away winner of the “Pack my mailbox” contender is my health insurance provider. No matter if you have Scan, Blue Shield, Kaiser, MemorialCare (that last one not exactly a feel-good nom de plume from where I sit here in life’s cynic section) or one I’ve missed, the weekly volume of trash disguised as mail is impressive.
Forests recoil in disgust at the easily avoidable arbor genocide, but no one listens to them.
What does every American do upon opening any envelope that has paper inside with the words typed in enormous letters, “This is not a bill”? We summarily throw it in the trash.
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I do not need to be reminded how much I paid for my prescriptions, or what portion of my recent “procedure” would I have to pay before they’d let me out of jail, I mean the hospital, or have it include phone numbers to call if you have questions in any of the following languages: English, Russian, German, French, Portuguese, Japanese, Farsi, Spanish, Korean, Vietnamese, Hindi, Telugu, Tagalog, Traditional Chinese and, my personal favorite, Simplified Chinese.
With 193 member states in the UN, methinks ole Scan might have skipped a few. Hey, try saying “assay of troponin quantitative” or “collection venous blood venipuncture” in Arabic and see how far you get.
But that’s not all. When I received my Issue X, 2026 (no month or quarter like Spring 2026, just issue X), the happy, maniacally grinning while exercising old farts on the cover made me want to call my PCP to get a script for acute nausea.
Who grins while exercising except for the 20-something at the head of the group counting training fees?
I remember waiting rooms where you could peruse “Yachting Today” and “Designer Home Quarterly.” Now all that’s there is Scan Club Issue X. I inserted X for an actual number to protect the guilty.
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Shaun Tumpane is a Laguna Woods Village resident.