Special Delivery

This is a story that was told to me years later by the legend who did this, and was corroborated by his brother. Names are changed to protect the guilty. The two characters in this story are 1. Joe and 2. Bob. The setting was a small college in the late 80’s early 90’s. The two are in college together and live in the same dorm. They also went to the same high school where Joe picked on Bob regularly. Joe was popular and an athlete and Bob was not, but Bob was very bright, shy and unbeknownst to everyone, absolutely fucking cold blooded. After years of abuse that had only gotten worse while in college, Bob developed an evil scheme unique to his talents and skills.

Bob was a Computer Science major and this is before the full integration of the internet as part of our everyday lives. Most correspondence was done through the mail. And college kids back in the day, mail was important for care packages from home, letters from friends and loved ones, or tapes or CD’s through Colombia House, or even things like student loan checks, report cards and the like. No cellphones, no email, no text messages. Just communal pay phones and the mail.

As mentioned, Bob was very bright. He was getting good grades and landed an internship where he was working for a tech company that would build databases to help larger companies build and maintain customer mail address lists. He helped develop a program that would eventually be replicated and sold to retail companies, coupon production and distribution companies, and companies that send out commercial promotional solicitation letters, fliers or postcards; you know it as junk mail. While working on this address database, he slipped into the code some hidden lines where Joe’s college mail address would populate as a database record every so often. This program gets finalized and sold to a bunch of companies who use this program to manage their customer distribution lists.

Over the next few weeks to coming months, when Joe went to go get his mail from the dorm mail room, he suddenly had more generic junk mail than everyone else. Multiple copies of Chinese restaurant menus, “Save the Children” brochures, Sears seasonal shopping catalogs, etc. The volume of mail everyday grew to literally bags of mail and Joe had to sort through hundreds, if not thousands, of mail items addressed to him to get to his real mail. He would shout and scream in rage and frustration, all the while Bob would watch quietly and secretly revel in Joe’s misery.

Bob, if you read this, I’m sorry to share this if Joe also reads this and realizes it was you after all these years.

Joe, if you’re reading this, you were an asshole. Get fucked.