I think with this story, I’m about to sound like someone who just crawled out from under a very large rock, or a person who acts older than their actual age. Oh well, here goes, in the hopes that it might help someone else.
I have said before that I hate picking out greeting cards in a store. Even with Aira helping me, it’s a long and tedious task and right now, that’s not what I want to be doing. If I’m in a store, I get in and get the heck back out again. So I haven’t been big on buying greeting cards.
But then I got a message from a friend of a friend saying my friend is in the hospital after some kind of brain injury and could really use some cards to brighten up her day. Darn it all, that means I have to get a card from somewhere. I tried calling the hospital’s gift shop to see if they could bring cards to someone if I paid them. I had heard this was a thing. But sadly they never picked up the phone. I was on my own again.
Then Steve wondered if the old Blue Mountain Cards place still exists, and holy crap, it does! I couldn’t believe it! I found that place way back in the late 90’s when I was just learning how to use the internet and web-based email accounts. Anyway, back then you could send ECards for free and I think I did it pretty regularly. They had cute little songs that would play and I could read the words written on the card and put in my own message. I don’t know what made me stop going there, maybe I got scared by an ad for a credit card or they started asking for payment and I didn’t have a credit card back then or something, but I completely forgot about this place.
Luckily for me, it still exists in an updated form. The cards aren’t free, but a subscription to this would pay for itself after getting a few cards a year since it’s 20 bucks for the whole year, and it makes sense to have to pay something for all the work they put into these. Also, there are some cards you can print at home. So for people who don’t have email, at least there’s that.
So I texted my friend a card. I know it isn’t a physical card, but I thought at least it’s something. I hope she enjoyed it.
Then a couple of days later, I got a card from Jaquie Lawson cards, another ECard place. These ones actually included descriptions of the videos and they ran as the video ran. How cool is that? It looks like the subscription to this one is about the same as Blue Mountain Cards.
I didn’t know there were still so many ECard services out there. I assumed they had kind of faded away. I guess I was wrong.
Reading this reminded me of the old days when I was teaching myself the internet and somehow managed to discover that KFC would let you send greeting cards with pictures of boxes of chicken on them. I wonder if you can still do that.
I had totally forgotten about the KFC greeting cards. I remember asking someone what it looked like and they said “It’s a card with a picture of a box of KFC on it.” Yup, I guess it came as advertised.
My favourite part of that story is that you trusted me with your university email address since I didn’t have one of my own yet.
“If you ever want to send anything to anyone when you’re here, just use my address,” said Carin like a person who had not met me before.
Even better was when I would ask you to reply to someone if I was away at class, and you would write just like I do. It was spooky!
It’s a good thing I’m trustworthy as far as you know.
I wonder if I could still mimic you as well as I could back then. I feel like it might be a little harder now.