I once had a job (one of many different jobs which one day I will attempt to list on this blog) as a Media Analyst. This rather grand sounding job involved reading endless articles from newspapers and measuring how many column centimetres about a given organisation were devoted to particular subjects. The data was then put into a report and sent to the client at regular intervals so that they could assess the perceptions of them,
Anyway, this is beside the point really except that there was a girl who sat next to me who had lost her purse. This she reported to the police with little hope of its return.
In due course she received a letter from the police, clearly an automated jobby with particular fields selected from the database to make it appropriate to her particular crime. I don’t remember the nature of the letter, probably confirming the details and checking that the purse had not turned up. The thing which struck the girl as amusing, and still tickles me pink, is that the letter started ?Dear Loser?. I wonder what other people’s letters said: Dear Rapee? Dear Accident Victim? Dear Flasher Viewer? Dear Burgled?