My company runs email campaigns like any other. You know, the usual sales promotions, monthly specials, etc. Just click the unsubscribe link at the end of the email to opt out / unsubscribe permanently.
A couple of weeks ago we received an actual, honest to goodness US Postal service real snail-mail letter to our department. Written in the feminine cursive of my parents’ generation, it reads as follows:
Dear Sir,
Please unsubscribe me from your internet.
My email address is: XXXXX@XXXXXXXXXX.com
Thank You
Always,
Joyce
P.S. My internet gets too full all the time.
— I know how you feel, Joyce.
51 comments ↓
Classic!
I’m surprised her children or grandchildren didn’t show her how to unclog the tube.
That’s funny, my _interwebs_ gets too full all the time too…
My intertubes are clogged right now. I’m on my way out to get a snake and some drano. lol
She’s is ahead of at least 80% of people of her age in the world….probably a real hottie in her days
Please tell us all that you sent her a genuine snail-mail reply, as well…
…That would make this story perfect.
Awwww that’s kinda cute in a way.
My g’ma started using a computer at about 70 years old. One day she called my dad, terrified and certain she’d broken her computer.
The problem?
The post on the front page of our family’s blog was too short to cause a vertical scrollbar to appear.
She seriously thought her computer was about to start smoking and possible explode.
Bless her - I thinks that’s sweet. I used to sell computers for an evil empire called Tandy way back in 1993 and I gues I was one of those “losers” who didn’t mind taking the time to give them the straight deal without any gold plated cables.
One lady was afraid to buy a computer because she really didn’t know what to do with it when she got home - she was especially afraid of knowing how to plug in those cables. I unpacked a Packard Bell and showed her the color coded cables and let her hook it up and turn it on the first time. She smiled.
A few days later she came in all exited just to tell me she had emailed her friend in Tampa and SHE ANSWERED!!!
Needless to say I didn’t last very long at Tandy - and Computer City and Incredible Universe both closed shortly after that.
Please folks - be kind to your elders. There is nothing wrong with profit per se - but don’t let it prevent you from doing the right thing.
Old People Rock!
@Michael Morris
Thanks for that story. Old People *do* Rock!
Don’t clown, she probably knows that by clicking on the link she is confirming her e-mail address to a spam-bot. By cleverly sending a letter she has circumvented this security hole because no spammer would take the time to harvest e-mail addresses from real mail.
So, you’re a spammer?
@Anonymous - I guess it was only a matter of time before someone made that accusation. Fair enough.
Let me tell you, I hate spam as much as anyone. For the record, she only received a valued-customer discount email after already purchasing from us and opting in. Rest assured we quickly unsubscribed Joyce as soon as getting her request. No question about it, non-un-subscribable emails are a surefire way to alienate all of your customers and kill your business fast!
LOL
I know a lot of old people who are like that with technology. It’s amusing but I try not to be patronizing.
After all, while they don’t understand technology, old people are quite interesting to talk to, so you don’t want to act like some snot nose brat. ;P
Also, I don’t want to build bad karma for when I’m old and don’t understand newfangled things.
@Jeremy, @Mike Morris, @Slenderdog, @Kelsey .. couldn’t agree more!
I’ve always liked the Muhammad Ali Quote :
“A man who views the world the same at fifty as he did at twenty has wasted thirty years of his life. ”
So just push that out to 70,80,90…..
me too!
I want to unsubscribe from this daft internet thing, I used to have a life and see sunlight now and then…
how can I do it…?
lol!
;]
MattG
Photoshopped
Bless the old people, we will be them someday!
Sometime in the late 90’s I was doing phone support and took the time to walk an older gentleman through out Internet product install on his old win95 machine, with the install media On Diskettes! Took forever, but when I got to talking to him, he was one of the old nuclear engineers that worked on the 1st nuclear submarine, and he was full of stories. Glad I took the time that day. I hope that’s good karma for when I’m confronted with Internet 5.0 some day in the future.
Dear Sir, Please unsubscribe me from your internet. | nerdd.net…
\r\nSomeone attempts to unsubscribe from an email list by sending in self-addressed, stamped envelop…
Photoshopped? Why would anyone need to photoshop a letter, rather than just writing it and taking a picture? Remember writing?
I’ve no doubt this is real. Sounds like something my mother would do.
Lol, and this is why Microsoft is still at the top. Where would the world be without the ’start’ button.
It’s easy to forget that not everyone is that saavy when it comes to the basics of the Internet, the World Wide Web and email. At least she had an email address and knew what it was. With that said, it’s pretty funny.
I am an OAP who is finding it increasingly hard to keep up with the flood of changes. I say “increasingly” because years ago I was right there with the latest cutting edge of computer technology. I was writing software in machine code when there were not more than a few thousand people in this country who even knew what a computer was. So Jeremy W and Old Techie have it right. when you look at people older than yourself you are seeing how you yourself will be in years to come. What is now the bees knees of cutting edge tecnology will one day be someting that will only be mentioned in a history book.
My internet gets full all of the time too !!!
I beat the internet once. The end guy is hard.
I bet this lady knows how to do a whole bunch of stuff most of us haven’t got a clue about and may need someday.
Haha!!! In a nice way of course.
[…] Bórreme de su Internet www.mikeduncan.com/unsubscribe-me/ por trevonio hace pocos segundos […]
YOUR internet!
Really funny story, I can even see some of my friends actually asking me that…
[…] este sitio pueden ver una curiosa carta que una mujer envio a una empresa para pedir que por favor la borraran […]
Si, pero mis amigos no le gustan el robot sin un cabasa.
Anyway, that’s really quite the interesting letter… this old woman would probably be a really nice person to meet. Props to her for being so polite.
So you unsubscribed her, right? I mean…it’s the right thing to do…
As sweet and amusing as this is, it got me thinking; i wonder how many of us would find it hard to handwrite a letter these days, after so much reliance on our old friend Qwerty!
You people crack me up. Most of you are “assuming” that this lady is old. What is old? 35, 40, maybe 50 plus? Give me a break! If your a teenager or in your twenties everybody’s old in your view. Old has nothing to do with it. Some people actually enjoy taking time away from the computer and doing things properly and politely. Good for Joyce! I’ll bet she’s the sweetest twenty something year old… you’d ever hope to meet.
that is the sweetest thing.
All of your internets belong to us.
I like this very much.
Oh for goodness sake, you make older people sound like senile imbeciles, I bought my first computer in 2000 when I was 60, built my own in 2004 and now work from desktop and 3 laptops, one which is a MacBook. I 68 now and loving this Stumbleupon!
sandie
really CLASSIC!
sandie rocks!
At least she’s polite.
@Rod - I personally assume this is an older lady in her 60s or higher simply from the handwriting. My mom, if she were still alive today, would turn 70 this year, and her handwriting looked a lot like this. It came from an era when handwriting was a skill that was carefully developed into a free flow of letters which form words, not merely taught as letters that sorta hook together. Google up “Palmer method” and you’ll see what I mean. They don’t teach handwriting like this any more. It would be nice to think the writer of this letter is in her 20s or 30s, but I seriously doubt it.
Amazing. I put this story on my blog, with source, of course
“Always”? that’s the weird part.
Joyce, is that you? — http://interreality.org/~reed/tmp/joyce.jpg
One of the problems with the ‘unsubscribe’ link is that often the domain of the link is not the same as the domain of the company (because lots of companies outsource their marketing), so the user has no way of knowing if clicking the link unsubscribes them or merely displays a page saying they’re unsubscribed while moving their address to the top of the list of live, valuable email addresses to spam. Sophisticated users can waste 5 minutes of their life (for every such email they receive) verifying that it is a legitimate unsubscribe link, but the vast majority either always unsubscribe (and thus mostly just get more and more spam) or never unsubscribe (except perhaps via writing a completely unrelated email to an email address whose domain is that of the company).
I hope too when you say she “opted in” that she actually had to select a non-default option when purchasing to request to be emailed in the future.
Far too many companies try to hide the fact that they will be spamming their customers by having a default that the user must first notice and second change (uncheck a poorly labeled checkbox or whatever), or they say it will be ‘occasional’ where occasional means several times a week.
Was her email address Joyce@1932.com by any chance.
I’d have sent her a hand written letter back saying “Greeting Joyce, from the 21st Century… We noticed your pen and paper is ready for an upgrade, click here to update”
Bless, I love old people so I’m only messing.
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because the internets is a series of tubes and if your lookin at porn your gunna be blocking and slowing down my internets
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The letter is funny.
My Dad who is 70 will read emails but he never replys.
He only lives 7 miles from me but I’ll tell him to email me something and he never does. He’ll just pick up the phone and call (land line).
My Mother who lives in Florida will have nothing to do with a computer. Maybe it was the time she caught me viewing a clip a friend had sent me of this Asian woman shooting eels out of her azz. I don’t know.
Her neighbor and friend is 80 and she’s on her computer all of the time. I send her stuff to print off and give to my Mother all of the time. Go figure.
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