Mailbox Paranoia

[liveonearth]

OK, so it's been happening for years now. I don't know what it means, but I suspect. When I open my mail I notice, time and again, that someone has right-handedly lifted the corner of the flap on my envelopes. It is usually ripped just enough that one might be able to stick something in there, or detect what was in there. And so I suspect.

Of course, having my own characteristic delusions of grandeur, I think that the government is interested in me, that I am on some list somewhere, that I am one of the ones who would "disappear" if this were Pakistan or South Africa. Thank goodness it is not. Because it would be a little while before anybody noticed if I disappeared. I know who would notice first.

So what do you think? Am I paranoid? Or is there some new program for public mail checking that has happened since the Department of Homeland Security came into being? If someone is checking my mail and I don't know about it, what are the rules for their checking? Why don't I know about it? Or is the new flap-ripping just because of a change in the way mail is handled, or sorted? It doesn't look like a machine is doing it, and I thought that much mail these days is machine-sorted....but people are still very much in the process.

I betcha that there is a mail-checking program in force. It's the big story that hasn't broken yet. Tell me, am I deluded? I'm going to the post office now, to get stamps and boxes. And to the bank, to get quarters for the laundry.