Days of Yore: Going Postal

The days of the Pony Express, delivering mail by stagecoach, and the Wells Fargo Wagon were a good deal before my time. Even so, mail delivery has changed a lot in my lifetime.

Photo by Joanna Kosinska on Unsplash

When I was young, especially living in the Philippines and having family and friends in the US, mail was a lot slower than it is today. People mailing Christmas gifts to us had to mail it a couple months early if they wanted it to reach us on time. Consequently, we would often get Christmas gifts in January or February, or sometimes even later.

We sent letters in several ways:

• We would fold up the letter and place it in an envelope, licking the seal shut (which very rarely tasted good) and licking the stamps (again, not very delicious) to stick them to the envelope. We addressed the envelope.
• There were special envelopes that doubled as letters. We would write the letter on one side, then fold along the dotted lines, and fold special flaps over the top and sides and lick the seals shut. Then we would add stamps and address the side that was facing out. That saved paper.
• Postcards had a photo on one side and space for a short note, the address, and the stamp on the other side. You had to keep in mind that the note was visible for anyone to see, so best not to include information you didn't want the world to know.

We could also send packages, which typically required more postage. We would either put the item to send in a box and address the box, or wrap the item (or box) in paper and address that.

When ordering things by mail, we would fill out the order form that we got in the mail or in a magazine or by other means, and then mail it in. Sometimes that involved saving labels from cereal boxes to get the special prize that would be delivered sometime later. We had to wait for the order form to reach the place we were ordering from, and then for them to send the item that we ordered. When I was in the US in 3rd grade and 8th-12th grade, we got quarterly order sheets from Scholastic Book Club distributed at school, and we could order books. I loved getting those, as I enjoyed reading any chance I got. (One time in 8th grade I ordered a Where's Waldo? book which never arrived. I kept asking my teacher, "Where's Waldo?" when I wanted to check on the status. I never did get it. I don't recall if I got a refund. Most orders arrived fine, but that was an ironic one not to arrive.)

I attended 3rd grade in the US. I made new friends that year, and I was surprised after returning to the Philippines to receive a letter from Chris, one of my classmates in 3rd grade, and we became pen pals, regularly writing back and forth. Avis, another friend from 3rd grade, also became a pen pal when I was in the Philippines. She had Native American heritage, and she once sent me a dream catcher. I didn't know the significance of it at the time, but I thought it was very cool with the feather and everything. In high school in the US, our teacher was involved in a program to set up pen pals between France and the US. I signed up and was assigned a teen in Saint-Malo named Aurélien. He and I exchanged letters well after I graduated from high school. We shared about our respective cultures and other things. I practiced my French and he practiced his English. (I actually learned the English word "erudite" from him... I had to look it up when he used it in a letter to me! I'm sure he looked up the word érudit in his French-English dictionary and used the most similar translation.) When I studied in France in 1999, I was able to talk to him by phone, and I even visited Saint-Malo, but we unfortunately missed each other.

I got my first "electronic mail" (e-mail) address in high school (or it might have been 8th grade). That was exciting, especially since it was a brand new form of communication, and it was one way of "getting on the information superhighway." My first e-mail was with Juno.com. I would eventually stop using it due to excessive spam that far outnumbered the legitimate e-mails. (I also had an e-mail on my own domain, stevensauke.com, which I eventually deleted for the same reason.) I would get Hotmail later, and when Gmail was introduced, I got an e-mail with them when it was by invitation only. I also had e-mail addresses on my school's domain starting in high school, as well as a few others over the years.

E-mail sped up the ordering process. We still had to wait some time for the item to arrive, but we didn't have to wait for the order to reach the company. With the advent of online merchants, such as Amazon, it was even faster. Now (depending on what and where I'm ordering), I can sometimes order something and receive it the next day, or occasionally even the same day! Also, some things can now be downloaded rather than mailed. When writing a letter by e-mail, depending on how much the other person checks their e-mail, we can get a response within moments rather than months.

We have always received junk mail in the mailbox and spam in our inbox. Spam filters have come a long way and are now a lot better at filtering them out, but we still have to be careful, and we also have to check the spam folder from time to time in the event a legit e-mail was mistakenly filtered there.

Of course, no "Days of Yore" post would be complete without me pointing out that I do most of this now on my cell phone. My grandpa was amazed with how much I could do on my telephone! (I actually wrote his eulogy on my phone, read it from my phone, and designed the front of the program for his memorial on my phone because of our regular discussions about this. After the fact, I realized I should have mentioned that when sharing at the memorial.)

Days of Yore: Computers

Many of us have heard about how our parents walked 5 miles to and from school, in blowing snow, uphill both ways...and they enjoyed it! Did they? I don't know, as I wasn't born yet, but they did teach me to be honest, so maybe? I know I did not. (That may be partly because most of my childhood was in the Philippines, just north of the equator, where they don't get snow due to the tropical heat. I ran 5 miles to school in pelting rain, uphill both ways, slipping and sliding all the way, arriving at school and home muddy and drenched to the bone, and I enjoyed it! My homework was so waterlogged that my dog ate it. OK, maybe that didn't happen, though occasionally some of the rain-related details came close to the truth.)

Another thing we often hear is "Kids today will never know the struggle..." I hope to go through a few things that have changed over the years in the next few blogs (between poems). I feel like "Days of Yore" may be exaggerating a bit, but I was going to call it "Before the Internet" and then realized some of the things I might want to include were when the internet was young.

Photo by Boffy b
CC BY-SA 3.0 license

We got our first computer in the Philippines in 1988. Once we turned it on, we had to know the codes to get around. (It's been so long that I had to look it up just now because I've forgotten a lot.) We didn't have Windows yet, so we had to learn a lot to navigate MS-DOS.

C:\> kljadh
Bad command or file name
C:\> cd games
C:\games>

Once we turned on our computer, we had to navigate to the program we needed. The <dir> command came in handy when we couldn't remember the specific file name that we needed to open. Our IBM computer at home informed us there was a "Bad command or file name" when it wasn't happy with what we told it. Our Apple computers at school preferred the term "Syntax error" instead.

When I was working on a paper for school, I would open WordPerfect and type it up. We didn't have font choices at first, and when they were introduced, a different font was indicated by a different text color on the screen. We had to print the document to see what the fonts looked like. I remember coming back to the US in 1991 and being amazed with the new-fangled computers that actually showed on the screen what the fonts looked like!

When we wanted to print, we used our dot-matrix printers. Sheets of paper were attached to each other with perforations. We strung the papers into the printer with strips of paper on either side of the sheet with holes down the side so it could go into the rollers in the printer. The printer made loud noises as it printed. Once we were done printing, we would tear the last sheet off the ream on the perforated line, and then tear each page apart. We then tore the sides off the page, which also had perforations for that purpose.

When friends came over, they would sometimes bring their large floppy disks (so called because they were, well, floppy) with games on them. We would insert it in the disk drive (the computer above has two such disk drives) to play games. We didn't have them on the computer, just on the floppy disks, so we had to have the disk if we wanted to play the game. I loved to play Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?, Digger (also called Dig-Dug), Tetris, Pac-Man, Mario Bros, and more. (Side note: Seeing some of this on Stranger Things in more recent years brought back memories.)

As technology moved forward, the floppy disks got smaller and rigid. However, as we learned at BCTI, they were still floppy if you opened the outer case (not advisable if you're planning to continue using them, but a great way to destroy them if you needed to make sure to eliminate sensitive data on them).

When turning the computer off, there were several ways. The "proper" way was to type "quit" in the DOS prompt. (I learned the word "acquit" because I accidentally typed "aquit" and thought it was funny, so I asked my parents what "aquit" meant. But as I was asking them verbally, they didn't hear the way I spelled it, so they told me the definition of "acquit." I was surprised it was actually a word!)

If necessary, you could do "Ctrl-Alt-Delete" to turn the computer off. Now that only opens a screen with choices to lock your computer, open the Task Manager, or other options. In an emergency (such as the Blue Screen of Death or the diabolical cascading error messages, see below), it was sometimes necessary to hold down the power button until the computer turned off.

There were several errors that got annoying. "Bad command or file name" was one. "Syntax error" was another. But with those, you just had to retype the command correctly. You never wanted to see the Blue Screen of Death (BSOD), which was when the entire screen turned blue and had text explaining that the computer would be turning off now (but in a lot more words), whether you liked it or not. But as computers continued to advance, nothing struck more panic and the idea of diabolic laughter coming out of the computer (not literally, but nearly) as this, which was the stuff of horror movies and nightmares:

Picture found here

An error message would pop up and start jumping pell-mell around the screen, leaving a long trail going everywhere. It was a bit reminiscent of a leprechaun gleefully jumping all over the room and causing mischief, mayhem and destruction of everything in its path. It moved too fast for me to try to click the button as I chased it around the screen.

In 8th grade, we started learning about a new concept called the information superhighway. At first I pictured a literal paved highway across the US with circuits running through it, where people could exchange information. That turned out not to be the case. It is now called the internet. Our first modems used the phone lines. We could connect to the internet, but we couldn't use phones at the same time. (This was an issue for some customers when I had an IT job helping with tax preparation software a few years later.) As the modems connected to the internet, they made very loud dialing noises and then a loud staticky noise. I'm glad that has gone away since then.

On the whole, I loved computers. But they had some quirks that I am thankful have been worked out over the years.

My grandpa and I had a running good-natured argument about what was better: computers or typewriters. He used his typewriter, and couldn't see the point of computers. I insisted that computers were better. Someone tried giving him a computer once, and it just sat there and collected dust while he used his typewriter. One time our power went out and I called him to ask if I could borrow his typewriter. He laughed for several minutes. Another time he commented he had seen a typewriter exactly like his in a museum. He didn't get an e-mail address until the last couple years of his life, and I helped monitor it. Toward the end, he commented that he wished he had learned more about computers sooner, as he was starting to see the benefits more.