The Book of Merle

6:00am: more fun with advertising
Driving up I-880 in Oakland, a few miles before the 980 interchange there's a huge billboard that reads:

"I scream, you scream, we all scream for green beans"

This, from the highly intelligent and well-schooled marketing division of Kaiser Permanente. Apparently a degree in marketing does not require any grammar or literature, retroactive to kindergarten, otherwise they might have stumbled across the extremely obscure literary convention known as rhyming.

1:00pm: ...where everybody knows your name
I was downstairs by the mail boxes and saw our normal mail carrier. I said hi to him, and proceeded to leave to pick up my laundry, only to hear him say "(my name), there's a package for you, I'll leave it up here.".

It freaked the hell out of me.

In retrospect, of course he knew my name. He has been delivering to my building for at least six years, and I have picked up a number of packages. While sorting mail into apartment boxes he probably sees peoples' names and remembers them. But I had never introduced myself, nor had my name (to my knowledge) come up in any conversation with him. Somehow I subconsciously expected that we did not know each others' names.

Some days I feel I really belong in a strict Edwardian society, where one cannot speak to anyone else without a formal third-party providing introductions.