A different kind of voice mail

Have you ever been left (or do you ever leave people) a message like this:

Hey, it's Bob. There's something really important I have to talk to you about. Call me back as soon as possible.

Am I really expecting too much for them to just say what this critical matter is in their voice mail? And if I don't recognize the voice immediately, the lack of context makes it that much harder to figure out which Bob to call, assuming it isn't a wrong number in the first place.

But this post is not about that kind of voice mail. It's about what kind of oddness a similar thing would be in the real world, because that's what happened to me last week. Anybody who knows me knows that my life already has an elevated level of strange, but even so it saw a little spike last week when I found the following in my mail:

The return address:

Richard L. Dodson
P.O. Box 1818
Cumberland Md.21502-1818

is unknown to me. Even more odd is the postmark, which appears to be:

Roaring Springs, TX 79256

Needless to say, that's nowhere near Maryland. Someone who wasn't impossibly stupid might just dump that kind of suspicious, unsolicited material right in the trash. I was dumb enough to open it and find inside:

That's it. Just a white CD, apparently audio, labeled only with "Carrar". That's the limit of my stupidity, though. I don't have anything to play it other than computers here, and I'm not about to stick a strange CD into one. What I was willing to do further is a little searching online to find out what this could be. High on my list of I-bet-it-is-a was some annoying marketing gimmick.

But there was essentially nothing about it. The only thing relevant I could find were these comments on Amazon, which seem irrelevant to the product listed. I don't recognize the names of the two people posting there, either. At least I knew I wasn't the only one who had gotten this; both of the others relatively recently, too. Curiouser and curiouser.

Since one of the people commenting there actually played the CD, it wasn't at all comforting to hear it was some kind of religious diatribe. I can only guess at why this might have been directed at me or those people. I'm still not convinced there isn't also some kind of malicious program on it as well.

So what's the big idea? If you're sending these out to people across the country, please leave a comment and say why. If you've received one yourself, let's hear about it! I especially hope Charles H. Murphy IV and Bill Flynn find their way here and can comment further.