Here's one from the 1890W file:

"Hi there. My name's Mark Flanagan. I'm one of the boys in the neighborhood taking a route check... And the terrific part of my offer is that if you sign up with me, I'll come by every month to collect the payment for your magazines."

I memorized those lines in 1964, had absolutely no use for them after about a week, but still they have uselessly floated around somewhere deep in my gray matter, except when pulled to the surface by something in the news - something like our recent story, "A job from hell."

Summer jobs were hard to come by 44 years ago - illustrating, perhaps, that some things never change - and I jumped at the chance when a friend said he knew where I could earn minimum wage ($1.25 an hour) pitching magazines door-to-door.

My experience was not as severe as the three young adults' whose story was told by Rick Foster on last Sunday's front page. They went to Philadelphia; I traveled no further than Woonsocket, R.I. They were carted around recklessly in a van; my crew's driver paid more attention to safety than most of the friends I rode around with on my own time. I never saw any of the other young door-to-door salesmen steal anything. I did, however, hear some bragging about scores they had made in hallways, including one kid who had reportedly made off with a family's entire stash of Christmas presents. And the sales pitch we were required to memorize, it became obvious on my first day on the job, was an absolute lie. We were, in effect, preying on the elderly - the most likely demographic group to be at home during the hours we were knocking on doors - making a promise that we would be dropping in once a month to collect, when the fact was that they would never see us again. I got fired after the first week, having made only one sale (and that is one little example of "success" that I regret to this day.)

Sue Rodabagh, George Tibbetts and Derek Isbister's story hit home. They have all my sympathy. Alas, where these young adults probably wish for nothing so much as to someday forget their whole magazine sales experience, I regret to advise them that whatever sales pitch they had to learn in Philadelphia is something they will probably be able to recite verbatim to their grandchildren.

1890W... and letters

As for the 1890W file I mentioned earlier, that's what I call the region of my mind, or whatever, where useless bits of information - like 44-year-old magazine pitches - go to never die. The reason: 1890W was my family's first telephone number. I could just as appropriately call it the June 5 file, June 5 being the birthday of my best friend ... from fourth grade. Or I could call it the "Whan Aprille with its shoores soote" file if it weren't so unwieldy.

Anyway, there's a lot of useless information cluttering up my brain, or whatever, and the dropdown menu for "empty the recycling bin" is nowhere to be found. This would not be a problem, except there doesn't seem to be room for new useful stuff. It does no harm to remember Gregg Carpenter's birthday, but I sure wish I could find some room to remember those of Mikaela, Heather and Eric Flanagan, nieces and nephew, whose uncle loves them more than the ever-late or entirely overlooked birthday presents might indicate.

Meanwhile, we've had something of a backlog of letters to the editor. For the past decade I've been editor of the letters to the editor, during the season around July 4 I'm usually scraping to fill our Voice of the Public space. In this summer of the "staycation," we have had a bumper crop of letters. Knock on wood, it looks like we're close to catching up.

In the midst of this, one familiar signature in the letters column e-mailed to ask why his missives have been held up while two by Anna DeMarinis appeared this week, contrary to a policy of allowing no more than one letter a week per writer (and usually fewer). Moreover, when I checked, I found that the DeMarinis letters ran on back to back days.

How can an editor forget that he ran a letter by the same writer just a day before?

Call 1890W for the answer.

MARK FLANAGAN (mflanagan@thesunchronicle.com) is Opinion page editor of The Sun Chronicle. He can be reached at 508-236-0335.