Greeting cards

I wanted to purchase a greeting card that would let me write the message myself. My first stop was a conveniently located CVS pharmacy. They had a vast selection of greeting cards. Yet every last card had some sort of idiotic jingle already written in it.

When you take the time to read these jingles, it becomes clear how greeting card companies select the people who create them. Basically, company recruiters invite prospective employees for an interview, sit them down and challenge them to expound upon a theme. It could be a general theme, such as “Happy Birthday”, or something more specific, such as “Good luck on your Communion, from your Mother’s second ex-husband”. I think that one was located in aisle four.

Prospective job candidates, pen in hand, attempt to compose a verse that expresses the emotion of the given occasion. The candidate may try to be funny, rueful, poetic, lyrical, ironic, or some combination thereof. Prospective employers read the results carefully. If they find that the candidate has succeeded in any of these goals, even in a small way, then the candidate is immediately shot, gangland style, and their lifeless body dumped behind an old greeting card warehouse somewhere in New Jersey.

This process is iterated in a methodical way, until all human beings capable of writing a decent greeting card have been systematically eliminated from the population. Whoever is left alive is then hired as a professional writer of greeting cards.

I may be wrong about some details of this process — I am merely reconstructing a plausible scenario based on the available evidence. Yet if you read through many of these cards, I think you will agree that this, in essence, must be the standard procedure.

Two blocks away I found a lovely little store called Papyrus that offers a large section of the most extraordinarily beautiful and imaginatively decorated blank greeting cards. I purchased one of these, and proceeded to write my friend a note that said exactly what I wanted to say.

6 thoughts on “Greeting cards”

  1. Yes, Papyrus has lovely things! They have stores in California too. And just think how much money they must save on interviewers and bullets by having blank cards. Not to mention that their cards tend to be more expensive. What a great business model 😉

  2. Ah, but there’s the tragedy. He’d be the very first to die.

    They know that even a single card by such a genuine talent could cause the entire commercial greeting card universe to collapse upon itself into a singularity.

  3. Did you notice, where the GET WELL cards were in relation to the SYMPATHY cards? In Hallmark stocked stores, the GET WELL cards are RIGHT NEXT to the SYMPATHY cards. Bad on so many levels.

  4. I use a company called SendOutCards for that specific reason. I can customize the greeting card anyway I want and include my verse and pictures. I make it on my computer and hit send and the company does the rest for me all the way until the recipients house. Pretty cool thing is that it costs less than a dollar.

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