San Francisco, California
December 15, 2000

Dear Readers,

Today’s found letter was one of the first I collected for Other People’s Mail. It was given to me by my friend D.C., who has provided me with enough material over the years to start his own franchise of the zine. I asked D.C. to make some comments about how he came by today’s letter, and about serving time at Kinko’s. Here’s what he wrote:

This came to me through a fellow employee of Kinko’s when I was working there in college. Apparently a big bodybuilder walked in around four or five o’clock one morning and laboriously pecked it out on the public typewriter. When he brought it up to have it copied (about an hour later), my co-worker automatically ran off a couple of extra copies for himself, and passed one on to me later.

Documents like this are a welcome antidote to the crushing volume of corporate reports and meaningless Powerpoint presentations that comprise the bulk of Kinko’s work. The copying drone is surrounded by the clunking of car-sized production copiers emitting two copies per second. Breathing in their exhaust, he or she exists only to service these machines with paper and toner and to collate and bind their product for hours through the night. Such a drone naturally welcomes the eccentrics who populate the store in the small hours of the night. While the desperate, obsessed, and insane may comprise but a tiny percentage of Kinko’s revenue, they feed a thriving economy of found documents, an endless traffic among employees in copies of gory evidence photos, tragic résumés, breakup letters, arcane pyramid schemes, advertisements for sex furniture. Over the years, I funneled some of these to Other People’s Mail. Others, yet undiscovered, are sitting in the recycling bin at your local Kinko’s right now.

Tomorrow, my guest-editorship of Open Letters will conclude with a special Saturday edition, a final selection from the back files of Other People’s Mail.

Sincerely,

Abby Bridge