The other day, I got this envelope in the mail. It was addressed to me in actual handwriting, in a nondescript plain white standard 5×3 envelope. At first, I thought it might have been another wedding invitation, or maybe a card or something from the past, two of the only things that I could really warrant receiving mail from. There was no return address anywhere on the envelope either, so for a fleeting moment, I thought maybe it was full of anthrax or something too.
Inside the envelope was a folded piece of newspaper, and a post-it note with some fairly illegible cursive writing, signed off “-J” at the very end. I figured the newspaper must have been concealing something, acting as a wrapper for something else, maybe a card or a ticket, or something. But it turns out that there’s nothing at all. It was just a sheet of newsprint.
I took another stab at reading the post-it note, and realized it said “up to $3,500 for your trade-in!” And then I took another look at the actual newsprint itself, and it coincidentally a page for a Toyota dealership in the Atlanta area. It then dawned on me that this whole elaborate ruse was nothing but a creepily personalized advertisement, meant to fool me into thinking that an acquaintance really wants me to look at a Toyota.