New Year's Anti-Resolution

I don’t normally make New Year’s Resolutions. I think that resolutions should only be made after a dramatic, life-changing event, or a transition from one phase of life to another. Such as resolving to never pass a cop after being pulled over for speeding when you passed a cop. Nevertheless, I feel that the past three months have been a lot of hard work, leading up to the big Christmas shopping season, which actually paid off a tiny fraction of the work that I put into BazaarMart.com. I’m real tempted to make a positive, life-changing resolution. I wanted to resolve to give up the sarcasm, or maybe just cut back a bit, but the folks downtown at the Denver Newspaper Agency are making it real hard.

Some donut-head in marketing decided to make a Christmas gift of free newspaper subscriptions for us newspaper carriers. So instead of a list of New Year’s Resolutions, I’m making a list of reasons why I don’t want to subscribe to the newspaper that I deliver.

1. I already read the comics while I’m waiting for the truck to show up at the warehouse with the front-page section.


2. I’ve got a whole warehouse full of newspapers that I can take one home from any time that I want.


3. I can steal a sample from one of those forcibly subscribed “customers,” and they’ll probably thank me for not delivering it.


4. I can read the left over paper that I don’t deliver to that guy that never picks it up and builds a pyramid in the corner of his porch.


5. I don’t want you putting my name on your list of people that you’ve “previously done business with.”


6. I don’t want you calling me telling me that you’re giving me a free newspaper anyway.


7. I don’t want you giving me a free sample paper without calling me.


8. I don’t want you selling my name to one of your “associate companies,” whoever they are this week.


9. Last but not least, I see more damned newspapers every single night than I care to see in an entire lifetime, and the last thing that I want to see when I get home is yet another newspaper in my driveway that some other carrier delivered.


10. And one more just make it an even ten, I don’t want to have to get mad and threaten the other carrier, because I know that there’s nothing he or she can or would want to do about it, and even if I did, I would probably lose my job if not go to prison for murder, and they’d still replace the other paper carrier with someone else the very next day.