You can run, but you cannot hide. They will hunt you down, mercilessly, pitilessly, tirelessly. "They," of course, are the Annual Giving office at Princeton University.
The very first letter we received at our new apartment here in Paris was from Princeton: a request for a donation to some department or other. Today, we receive three pieces of mail from Princeton on the same day: a request for money from the rowing association (Anthony rowed his freshman year), a thank you card for having donated to Annual Giving (which we did online, to save paper, but then they mailed us a card anyway...), and the PAW (a.k.a the Princeton Alumni Weekly, a magazine which does not actually come out weekly, which you can see as ironically humorous or moronically misnamed).
When I lived in the Philippines, I spent about six months teaching scuba diving (I call it my ski bum phase, but I did it underwater) on a tiny island called Boracay. At that time, Boracay did not have regular electricity, and my housing did not have plumbing of any sort. I lived in a little cabin where I had to cross a sandy path beneath the palm trees in order to get to the outhouse I shared with a Filipino family, except that I couldn't go to the bathroom during wind storms for fear of a coconut falling on my head. That would be an embarrassing obituary: "Killed by a coconut on the way to pee."
This was before the days of wide-spread internet and e-mail, and certainly cell phones, and my parents would not have been able to find where I was on a map if you paid them. So you can imagine my surprise when one day I was called off the beach to the dive shop because a phone call had come through from the States. I raced to the phone, imagining some health scare from one of my parents. Instead I heard a chipper voice saying, "Hello, Ms. Regelman? My name is Ashley, and I'm a senior here at Princeton University. We want to thank you for contributing regularly in the past and would like to know if you would donate to Annual Giving this year as well..."
As I am finishing the previous paragraph, I hear a ping telling me an e-mail has arrived in my inbox. It is, naturally, an e-mail from Princeton class of '89 telling me to check out my class website and also pay my class dues. Moments after (and I am not exaggerating this for effect), I see on my facebook home page an invitation from the Princeton Alumni Association of France to a gathering in two weeks at an Irish pub in Paris. If I write this post much longer, I expect a knock on the door from a perky undergrad in a tiger-striped sweatshirt, armed with sleeping bag, tooth-brush, and point-of-sale credit card reader.
So, you may wonder where in the world I am, but the omniscient Orange-and-Black already knows where to find me. And, if you are a Tiger, they know where to find you, too. So don't bother to hide; they're coming for you...
The very first letter we received at our new apartment here in Paris was from Princeton: a request for a donation to some department or other. Today, we receive three pieces of mail from Princeton on the same day: a request for money from the rowing association (Anthony rowed his freshman year), a thank you card for having donated to Annual Giving (which we did online, to save paper, but then they mailed us a card anyway...), and the PAW (a.k.a the Princeton Alumni Weekly, a magazine which does not actually come out weekly, which you can see as ironically humorous or moronically misnamed).
When I lived in the Philippines, I spent about six months teaching scuba diving (I call it my ski bum phase, but I did it underwater) on a tiny island called Boracay. At that time, Boracay did not have regular electricity, and my housing did not have plumbing of any sort. I lived in a little cabin where I had to cross a sandy path beneath the palm trees in order to get to the outhouse I shared with a Filipino family, except that I couldn't go to the bathroom during wind storms for fear of a coconut falling on my head. That would be an embarrassing obituary: "Killed by a coconut on the way to pee."
This was before the days of wide-spread internet and e-mail, and certainly cell phones, and my parents would not have been able to find where I was on a map if you paid them. So you can imagine my surprise when one day I was called off the beach to the dive shop because a phone call had come through from the States. I raced to the phone, imagining some health scare from one of my parents. Instead I heard a chipper voice saying, "Hello, Ms. Regelman? My name is Ashley, and I'm a senior here at Princeton University. We want to thank you for contributing regularly in the past and would like to know if you would donate to Annual Giving this year as well..."
As I am finishing the previous paragraph, I hear a ping telling me an e-mail has arrived in my inbox. It is, naturally, an e-mail from Princeton class of '89 telling me to check out my class website and also pay my class dues. Moments after (and I am not exaggerating this for effect), I see on my facebook home page an invitation from the Princeton Alumni Association of France to a gathering in two weeks at an Irish pub in Paris. If I write this post much longer, I expect a knock on the door from a perky undergrad in a tiger-striped sweatshirt, armed with sleeping bag, tooth-brush, and point-of-sale credit card reader.
So, you may wonder where in the world I am, but the omniscient Orange-and-Black already knows where to find me. And, if you are a Tiger, they know where to find you, too. So don't bother to hide; they're coming for you...
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