To Mail or Not To Mail, That is the Question

I spent the long weekend finishing getting my first packets out and contemplating my spring letter to my girls, the one that is going to ask about the dresses and the workshop and such. And I found myself considering the odd conundrum of e-mail and what is now quaintly called snail mail, that I admit I still think of as just mail or regular mail. There are still a fair number of active members in Eastern Star that do not have e-mail or if they have it, they check it so seldom that it is no faster than regular mail. Then there are those that are so connected that you've barely hit the send key and your reply is already pinging for your attention. In one of those rare twists of fate, I am both of these people. I have no internet connection at home (listen to the roar of the dinosaur as she sinks back into the mucky tar pit from which she arose) but during the work week, usually from about 8:45 am to 6:30 pm, my e-mail runs on my computer constantly, so I can get answers back pretty quickly. Since I am seldom if ever home on evenings or weekends, this has worked well for me. But now I am trying to build a communication network with my girls all over the state and the ugly problem of cost v. communication is rearing its ugly head. Each time I mail out to all my girls (approximately 200 letters, assuming less than five pages in the envelope), it costs me about $200, between stamps, copies and of course, envelopes. With e-mail, I can send out those same letters for free. So with e-mail, I can send stuff out every month or so and with regular mail, I am limited to about once a quarter because of the cost. The problem is that if you send stuff out by e-mail, the people who don't have it feel left out, and if you stick to regular mail, you can't communicate as often as you want to. It has been suggested to me that I see who is willing to accept e-mail and send to them that way, and then mail copies to the others who don't have e-mail and I may try that, but it does make for a bit of bother sorting the one from the other all the time and making sure that the right envelopes get addressed. What a puzzlement! I was thinking about this particularly this weekend because I got the most delightful love gift with the most interesting note in it. Love gifts are token gifts that most Grand Officers get from their subordinate officers at the local Official Visit or other occasion when the Grand Family comes to visit an area. Usually each subordinate officer signs the card and puts a couple or a few dollars in the card. Former Grand Officers also often give love gifts to the current Grand Family at the Official Visits as well. Those gifts tend to be things like cards, stamps, bottles of water and other stuff that former Grand Officers know you can always use. The tradition is that you send a thank you note to each person whose name is on the card unless the card says No Thank You Note or NTYN on it. Former Grand Officers are really good about writing this on their gifts because they remember what it was like to get home and write fifteen thank you cards for the weekend. The funny backward situation that this can create is that you can have what are sometimes referred to as negative presents, as odd as that sounds. It happens when, for example, you have a district of seven Chapters and you get a card signed "From all the [Your Office Here] Officers of District X" and it has five dollars in it. So you send a thank you note to each of the seven subordinate officers, which costs you about seven dollars when you add the cost of the stamp to the cost of the card, and you find yourself two dollars behind. It is actually a bit amusing, at least the first dozen times or so. :-) But what these amazingly clever sisters did in the love gift they provided is that they gave me an e-mail address and asked me to send any reply to them by an e-mail that could go to all of them. This was Awesome! I was able to send all of them a very prompt thank you, and could put in more words and details than fit in a card and I didn't have to worry about running out of cards. I had never had anyone suggest that an e-mail thank you was okay before and I wonder if such a thing could catch on because right now I am thinking that I really ought to buy stock in Current, for all the dozens of thank you cards I am constantly buying from them. I do know that many people find e-mail to be impersonal, so I doubt that many people will want to get their thanks this way and I know that the value of the cards I send is far more than the cost of the paper and the stamp because I believe that people appreciate the personal touch of getting a card that they can keep from their Grand Officer, which is why I still hand write my cards instead of typing them, (although with the lack of quality in my handwriting, I am not sure that they wouldn't be happier with the typed card), but I must say that an e-mail allows me to have a more personal conversation than the cards do, simply because I can write more and can have a dialogue follow up. So it will be interesting to see how e-mail will (or won't) change the face of the Eastern Star communication world, including the thank you card. Next weekend, I am in Yorba Linda and Ventura.