Posted: 9/20/2010 8:50:50 AM EDT
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My son, who is a life member, has convinced me that I should post some of these stories.....
One day my good friend and colleague, Bill, and I were fetching our mail from the mailboxes near the front office. He looked at my healthy stack of mail, mostly magazines, catalogs, and the like, and then compared that to his paltry one or two letters, and remarked how he sure wished he would get more mail. A third friend was there, and he and I looked at each other, and instantly, with no verbal communication, we knew what we had to do. Virtually all industries have a plethora of free trade publications. We decided that he needed to be subscribed to a few. Well, OK, maybe more than a few. Alright, I admit it, it was an all out assault, an attempt to inundate him so completely that it would take a separate zip code to handle the mail volume. We wanted nothing less than a veritable flood of mail of such magnitude that it would become an unstoppable river of paper. So we started initially with the magazines we each got, and were familiar with, and simply subscribed him to each. But this limited us to the electronics field and we realized that this was only a few dozen magazines, so we started keeping those packages of “bingo cards”; the postcards where you circle numbers to get catalogs. We would spend an hour or so each evening filling those out. Then we started to scour for journals outside our field. We located magazines related to road construction, restaurant management, floor coverings, and a large variety of other topics. Marvelous titles like “Stone World” (This was about the architectural uses of stone, folks), “Roads & Bridges”, and many other interesting topics We subscribed him to each of these as well, and also filled out more bingo cards related to each of those professions. We also decided that it would be funnier if we altered his name and title a bit. So we ended up with a few dozen name and title variations, as well. We obviously had to make the titles sound appropriate for the industry as well. We also found a few websites that sped up the process, and then moved on to request travel and tourism information from numerous states. Thus Bill King morphed into : Don King, Promotions Manager S. Willy King, Fellowe Clyde King Rev. Dr. Willy King, Theological Physicist Polly Esther King, Polymer Chemist, High Injury Corp. Sigmund King, Aeronautical Design Engineer Reginald King III Bill “Maddog” King, Production Manager John Paul King, Machinist’s Mate 2nd Class, USS Rounce (drydock) Billy J. King And many others. After a few weeks of intense effort, we had to simply sit back, and quietly wait. We estimated that the full impact would take about 8 weeks. We would anxiously and surreptitiously eye his mailbox each day to gauge our progress. As expected, the mail volume started to pick up after about 4 weeks, and in 2 months the mail was pouring in. John H., our maintenance man usually would pick up the mail, and he stoically accepted the ever increasing burden of this task as he lugged ever heavier boxes of mail back from the post office each morning. . Each day would bring a new foot tall (or more) pile of wonder; Magazines about the many uses of stone. Journals with articles about the latest in high tech gadgets for the food service industry. Discussions about the technology of concrete. More engineering magazines of all disciplines than are imaginable. And catalogs for everything from blowguns, to 1000 ton cranes, to three wheeled adult sized tricycles. Many were actually quite interesting to read. The worst part (or best part, depending on one’s perspective) of course, was that for catalog requests there were often follow-up phone calls from salespeople. This got to be quite distracting for him….. hehehehhehe………. Naturally, we finally had to admit what we had done. Of course there was some small amount of retaliation in kind, and thus I get some magazines with titles like, “Observer of Alternate Reality”, or “Director of Astrophysics Dept.”, or “Senior Industrial Spy”….. I had originally thought to call this a “Mail Bomb” campaign, but in today’s world that is probably a poor choice. Perhaps “Aggravated Distraction by Mail”, or something. My father commented that had this been done to him, he would likely have had a nervous breakdown. I felt a strong sense of remorse after that…..for about 3 microseconds…… |
| i did this to my ex-wife, in the seventies. i went to magazine stands, and bookstores and got the little 'reply, no postage required'' cards from the material, and deluxed her ass up.best i remember, i got the idea from the ''bag of dirty tricks'' booklet that they used to sell at gunshows,probably still do. |
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I'm all for a good prank, but using resources that someone else has to pay for kind of ruins it for me. If you want to prank someone, at least pay for it yourself. Oh well, at least you won't be bitching next time the postal rates or go up or the businesses you deal with raise their prices to cover their extra marketing costs, right? |
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Quoted: And we're off... I'm all for a good prank, but using resources that someone else has to pay for kind of ruins it for me. If you want to prank someone, at least pay for it yourself. Oh well, at least you won't be bitching next time the postal rates or go up or the businesses you deal with raise their prices to cover their extra marketing costs, right? There's a reason I didn't renew my membership to this site. |
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This is a little out dated. Nowadays this is done with email and porn sites. Electronic emails are a whole lot easier to carry around, store, and throw out than a 15lb stack of magazines you recieve in your mailbox daily. Hard to do this with emails 
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Nice first post OP. Welcome to the club.
Years ago when I was serving a mission for my church, we had kind of an ongoing prank campaign with some of the sister missionarys. Mostly leaving rotten food in each others cars etc. One day I came across one of those "Stop Bedwetting!" post cards in a magazine. The ones with the big red stop sign on them. So for fun, I filled it out with the sister's information on it. Haha. Big deal. So they start getting some extra junk mail. The great part though is that after a few weeks they get a phone call. The girl on the other end sounds very concerned and is asking if they have recieived the information, if they found it helpful etc. Finally the sister missionary apologizes and tries to explain to the girl that they really don't have this problem and that this was just part of a joke. The girl on the other end then gets completely offended and proceeds to rip into this poor sister about how "bedwetting is not a laughing matter". 
I know, csb. But it really was worthwhile when the sister calls me up all pissed off because she just got her ass chewed. |
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Quoted:
I'm all for a good prank, but using resources that someone else has to pay for kind of ruins it for me. If you want to prank someone, at least pay for it yourself. Oh well, at least you won't be bitching next time the postal rates or go up or the businesses you deal with raise their prices to cover their extra marketing costs, right? lighten up francis 
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Quoted: LOL, yeah, filling out the "please ask for our advertising" card is really putting those businesses out.Quoted: I'm all for a good prank, but using resources that someone else has to pay for kind of ruins it for me. If you want to prank someone, at least pay for it yourself. Oh well, at least you won't be bitching next time the postal rates or go up or the businesses you deal with raise their prices to cover their extra marketing costs, right? lighten up francis I can only imagine the cool shit I could piss away money on if I only knew about it. The story is supposed to be "oh teh noez!" and all I can think is "that sounds fun, I should to it to myself because our local bulk mail sucks!" I think I'm lonely....  |
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Quoted:
I'm all for a good prank, but using resources that someone else has to pay for kind of ruins it for me. If you want to prank someone, at least pay for it yourself. Oh well, at least you won't be bitching next time the postal rates or go up or they have to stop Saturday delivery or the businesses you deal with raise their prices to cover their extra marketing costs, right? |
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Quoted:
My son, who is a life member, has convinced me that I should post some of these stories..... One day my good friend and colleague, Bill, and I were fetching our mail from the mailboxes near the front office. He looked at my healthy stack of mail, mostly magazines, catalogs, and the like, and then compared that to his paltry one or two letters, and remarked how he sure wished he would get more mail. A third friend was there, and he and I looked at each other, and instantly, with no verbal communication, we knew what we had to do. Virtually all industries have a plethora of free trade publications. We decided that he needed to be subscribed to a few. Well, OK, maybe more than a few. Alright, I admit it, it was an all out assault, an attempt to inundate him so completely that it would take a separate zip code to handle the mail volume. We wanted nothing less than a veritable flood of mail of such magnitude that it would become an unstoppable river of paper. So we started initially with the magazines we each got, and were familiar with, and simply subscribed him to each. But this limited us to the electronics field and we realized that this was only a few dozen magazines, so we started keeping those packages of “bingo cards”; the postcards where you circle numbers to get catalogs. We would spend an hour or so each evening filling those out. Then we started to scour for journals outside our field. We located magazines related to road construction, restaurant management, floor coverings, and a large variety of other topics. Marvelous titles like “Stone World” (This was about the architectural uses of stone, folks), “Roads & Bridges”, and many other interesting topics We subscribed him to each of these as well, and also filled out more bingo cards related to each of those professions. We also decided that it would be funnier if we altered his name and title a bit. So we ended up with a few dozen name and title variations, as well. We obviously had to make the titles sound appropriate for the industry as well. We also found a few websites that sped up the process, and then moved on to request travel and tourism information from numerous states. Thus Bill King morphed into : Don King, Promotions Manager S. Willy King, Fellowe Clyde King Rev. Dr. Willy King, Theological Physicist Polly Esther King, Polymer Chemist, High Injury Corp. Sigmund King, Aeronautical Design Engineer Reginald King III Bill “Maddog” King, Production Manager John Paul King, Machinist’s Mate 2nd Class, USS Rounce (drydock) Billy J. King And many others. After a few weeks of intense effort, we had to simply sit back, and quietly wait. We estimated that the full impact would take about 8 weeks. We would anxiously and surreptitiously eye his mailbox each day to gauge our progress. As expected, the mail volume started to pick up after about 4 weeks, and in 2 months the mail was pouring in. John H., our maintenance man usually would pick up the mail, and he stoically accepted the ever increasing burden of this task as he lugged ever heavier boxes of mail back from the post office each morning. . Each day would bring a new foot tall (or more) pile of wonder; Magazines about the many uses of stone. Journals with articles about the latest in high tech gadgets for the food service industry. Discussions about the technology of concrete. More engineering magazines of all disciplines than are imaginable. And catalogs for everything from blowguns, to 1000 ton cranes, to three wheeled adult sized tricycles. Many were actually quite interesting to read. The worst part (or best part, depending on one’s perspective) of course, was that for catalog requests there were often follow-up phone calls from salespeople. This got to be quite distracting for him….. hehehehhehe………. Naturally, we finally had to admit what we had done. Of course there was some small amount of retaliation in kind, and thus I get some magazines with titles like, “Observer of Alternate Reality”, or “Director of Astrophysics Dept.”, or “Senior Industrial Spy”….. I had originally thought to call this a “Mail Bomb” campaign, but in today’s world that is probably a poor choice. Perhaps “Aggravated Distraction by Mail”, or something. My father commented that had this been done to him, he would likely have had a nervous breakdown. I felt a strong sense of remorse after that…..for about 3 microseconds…… Damn tree killer 
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Quoted: i did this to my ex-wife, in the seventies. i went to magazine stands, and bookstores and got the little 'reply, no postage required'' cards from the material, and deluxed her ass up.best i remember, i got the idea from the ''bag of dirty tricks'' booklet that they used to sell at gunshows,probably still do. I did the same thing to a neighborhood bitch who had pissed me off one time too many. Got all the subscription cards for every magazine I could find and filled them out in her name and checked the "Bill Me Later" option. She was still dealing with it months later. |
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And we're off...
I'm all for a good prank, but using resources that someone else has to pay for kind of ruins it for me. If you want to prank someone, at least pay for it yourself. Oh well, at least you won't be bitching next time the postal rates or go up or the businesses you deal with raise their prices to cover their extra marketing costs, right? There's a reason I didn't renew my membership to this site.  yeah, that'll show 'em.
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I once complained about not getting any mail at mail call when I was stationed on the USS Midway (home ported in Japan) in the early 80's.
A few weeks later there was a 6 inch stack of letters at mail call. They were all for me.
One of the guys I worked with was Philippino and had put my name in several Philippine magazines in the "pen pal" section. 
holy crap did I have mail for years. Some were hot 
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We did this to a guy at work subscribing him to about 30 different magazines that all wanted to be paid...it really wasn't funny in the end, he got harrased for months by collection agencies for not paying. I still can't believe that they actually shipped magazines to :Jabba Hover( he was FAT) Mr Blubber, et al...the letters he brought into work to show us were priceless! Dear Jabba, we know you are enjoying 'vibe' magazine...could you please remit 19.95 at your earliest convenience? 
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We did this to a guy at work subscribing him to about 30 different magazines that all wanted to be paid...it really wasn't funny in the end, he got harrased for months by collection agencies for not paying. I still can't believe that they actually shipped magazines to :Jabba Hover( he was FAT) Mr Blubber, et al...the letters he brought into work to show us were priceless! Dear Jabba, we know you are enjoying 'vibe' magazine...could you please remit 19.95 at your earliest convenience? All the magazines we subscribed him to were free trade journals, so he did not have to deal with any bills or collection calls. |
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You're giving me some very evil ideas.  Years ago we put a certain 2 faced preacher on the porno mailing list and had his PO box flooded with smut. Not just any old run of the mill smut, but the good, serious vile stuff with 80 year old nuns, German Shepherds,and Nazi SS officers with riding crops. 
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He seems to have a lot of free time.
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Back in the the days of pagers, one of the guys I worked with was also working P/T out at DFW and the airline had issued him a pager. He had left it on the desk one afternoon, while QA'ing something out on our flightline. It went off. And stutterstepped its way across the desktop. Which immediately captured our attention, as well as amusing us. Between myself and two other QA reps, we must have called it a dozen more times, in an effort to see how far and where we could get the pager to go. After clearing all of the previous dozen or so pages, the last time we looked through the yellowpages, called his pager and left the 1-800 number for a dallas fort worth support group for gay men in hetero marriage. When he came back and checked his pager, and actually called that last number, ...  ... and we were
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Quoted:
Quoted:
I'm all for a good prank, but using resources that someone else has to pay for kind of ruins it for me. If you want to prank someone, at least pay for it yourself. Oh well, at least you won't be bitching next time the postal rates or go up or they have to stop Saturday delivery or the businesses you deal with raise their prices to cover their extra marketing costs, right? Can one of you please explain to me how more volume of mail will cause an increase in postage rates or a drop of Saturday delivery? Bulk rate mail is the lifeline for the Post Office especially since the advent of e-mail. If anything he's helping keep postage reasonable. |
