Last week we received a letter that only had my name and address and something like "Important Update Inside" on the envelope. Normally such mail goes straight to the recycle box. But my curiosity got the best of me.
It was from a regional manager of Frontier Communications, the telephone company for our cabin. It was about a recent 13 hour outage because a fiber optic cable was cut in Duluth. The cable was not Frontier's but supplied lots of its traffic.
The letter said that Frontier was working on (or had installed) a second fiber optic cable to provide redundancy.
Well, that was nice to know. I sympathize with Frontier with a problem outside its control and that it has taken steps to reduce the possibility of future outages.
The letter did have the name and email of the manager, and I did send him something about identifying mail.
This really comes under the third point of a free market - complete information (see "GMO producers don't want free markets"). Was Frontier trying to hide something by not identifying itself on the envelope? Was it outsourcing the mail to a firm that used a standard envelope for "hidden purpose" mass mailings? I'll probably never know because the Frontier manager never responded. We do know that this is another example of corporate "efficiency" at the expense of effectiveness.
