Les Bonnes Choses

I received an email the other day from my alma mater -- two, if you count the automated message telling me that my last remaining uwo.ca email account is due to expire at the end of next month. The non-automated message (or at least, the one that appeared less like a form letter) was to inform me that a UWO student had tried to contact me recently but was unable to do so, and encouraged me to take a moment to update my contact information. The email was sent from the UWO department of alumni relations department, specifically, the person in charge of annual gift giving.

So to be clear, my alma mater is asking me for a phone number at which they can reach me to ask for a donation. I doubt I'd be getting anything other than a script at that, so it wouldn't even be worth doing for the opportunity to tell someone how I was doing and what I was up to. I think the thing that I found notable was that they never explicitly said that was their purpose, and yet their intention is quite clear, making the request seem all the more brazen.

Ironically, the email at which they contacted me was the address that is set to expire in six weeks time because they can't be bothered to provide permanent email addresses to alumni. Had they just waited just a little while longer to try to contact me and been unable to do so, that would have been poetic.