We all get junk mail. I get tons of it in as email and a fair amount in my physical mailbox. Sometimes, I don’t want to waste the time to read it, so it goes straight to the trash. I don’t do that as often anymore because I’ve found that throwing stuff away without at least looking at it can be dangerous!
I got a phone call from a company asking why I had not cashed the refund check they sent me. (the check was for over $100 for a book that I had returned). I realized that since I had decided to stop ordering books from that company, I had just been throwing all of the mail from them straight into the trash. Bad Idea!
I got a call from a client who found a note on his door from the person who bought his house in a foreclosure sale. When I asked about being notified about the sale, the client said that he usually just threw away mail from people he didn’t know.
Sometimes, the mail we think is junk mail is just that — junk.
But sometimes it is really important!
Now, I open each piece of mail I receive. Sometimes I spend about 1.5 second glancing at the contents to make sure it really is ‘junk’ before it goes into the trash. But on that one time when I find something important, it is worth the extra time!
