September 2, 2006

 

Information Please, Pearson Education

501 Boylston Street, Suite 900

Boston, MA 02116

 

Dear InfoPlease,

 

I read your almanac almost every day. I work on the 44th floor of a Factoid Research Company. This is a company that researches factoids, little strange-but-true bits of information. I work as a file clerk, and I sometimes feed the hamster. His name is Gnipsen but we call him Lorraine. That’s not important. One time Gnipsen (Lorraine) disappeared for a day and we didn’t know what to do! That was until Gary Gnillins found him swimming in the water cooler. How he got in there was a mystery. He had little swimmies on, and even a bathing suit. He must have borrowed the swim trunks from Yolanda Gnuggins on floor 23 (she is five inches tall)

 

I use my InfoPlease almanac to research factoids my boss throws at me. He might say something like, “Dickinson!! Number of platypuses in Europe, STAT!” or “Get me the percentage of children in Wyoming with no ears, before I lose my patience!!” My boss Mr. Gnargal is a very impatient man. But you can’t blame him, he has to meet the quota. He eats his yams with a spork. Yams every day for lunch, he insists.

 

Thursday at work I needed to find out the surname of the last living saber-tooth tiger before they went extinct. I thought, “easy as yellow cake. I can handle this one like a pickle jar.” But I searched and searched through the pages of your almanac, and I could not find this factoid! Usually when I use the InfoPlease Almanac I find what I am looking for in under 23.9 seconds. But this time, it took me over 3.4 hours and I still didn’t find it!

 

My boss got very angry with me, as you can imagine. “DICKINSON!” he yelled at the top of his larynx. “WHERE’S MY FACTOID??” You know he is angry when he starts screaming in bold, underlined words. But I had no factoid for him. For lunch that day he could not eat his yam. He simply did not have the enthusiasm he usually exhibits when eating yams with a spork. I think it was my fault.

 

Maybe you should look into including the surname of the last living saber-tooth tiger (was it Johnson???) in the next edition of your almanac. I buy a new one every time it comes out. Sometimes I read 1984 (by Harriet Tubman) but mostly your almanac (at work)

 

 

Sincerely,

 

Kevin Dickinson

It's a Sincerely Insane first!
 One of the most obvious drawbacks (there aren't many) to having all your letters online is that a select few recipients of said letters will locate your site and choose not to respond. Here is my first e-mail response, and although it would be nicer on paper, I had to expect this from an almanac company, as he states below. (This is not made up and the e-mail address is one from the Info Please website.)

 

Dude. Being the people who put out an almanac, we can tell accurate information from a hoax, and we know a thing or two about research. It took about ten seconds to find your site after reading your letter.

 

Nice try, though.

 

Shmuel Ross

Information Please

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