Have You Had A Publishers Clearing House (PCH) Experience?

My husband calls my stacks of mail from the publisher’s clearinghouse ‘piles’. He says, “I don’t want your piles on my side of the table.” I decided to order Christmas presents from PCH to stay in the contest for the prize.

The mailman said, “I hate PCH, as they prey on older people.” I think he was calling me old! “It’s never-ending. They say it is ending at the end of this month and then it continues. In the meantime, most of what they sell is junk,” he said.

Okay, not what I wanted to hear but it didn’t stop me until Christmas came and went. I am not ordering anything now. Has that stopped the PCH mail from coming, no, and I don’t expect it to as I am now considered a super patsy?

So then, I will continue to throw the envelopes in the garbage and recycle the paper inside the envelopes. And is there ever anything else that I do to waste my time and money?

Of course, I have other avenues for wasting money, according to my hubby. I didn’t tell him about this one, or did I? I went to dinner one evening with a friend at the local diner/tavern and bought pull tabs for the two of us and she bought dinner. It had been many years since pulling tabs. It is a good thing I didn’t win. It is always a good thing when I don’t win when gambling. I think it encourages the behavior in me.

I am a bit concerned about gambling. My mother was a gambler and had to give up bingo as a young woman. She would talk about how she snuck out of the house, nine months pregnant with me, who was due in January, and fell. Her way to help her kids not go there was to never babysit for them to go to bingo or the casino.

I thought it was great that I couldn’t spend much time at the casino due to an allergy to smoke. Recently the casinos in my state banned cigarette smoking in them. I think I will continue to avoid them. I have a brother that does not avoid them as every time I talk to him, he is at the casino or headed there. Better I stay away, it may be in our blood!

Back to PCH. I ordered a storage box full of Christmas presents, everything from bug zappers to kitchen utensils to children’s books, candy, and other assorted junk. I thought it always looked good in the pictures. It looked cheap when it arrived and my thought was almost always, who could I give this to?

At a Christmas get-together, I brought the tub of items into the gift-giving space and asked the family who would like this and who would like that. I got rid of most of it. The few things that were left I found a place for.

I think maybe if I want to get rich, it is best to just write a best-selling book. However, will I do that writing short stories on Vocal and Medium at pennies an article? Maybe if I were to live many more years it could add up to something. I am 68 and don’t expect to live for too many more years.

It is a good thing I am comfortable with what I am doing and what I have and most everything I get involved in is more for fun than anything else. I enjoy getting mail, and especially packages. I enjoy looking through catalogs before I recycle them. I enjoy reading and now writing short stories.

Twenty twenty-one may be the last year I help to support PCH. Only time will tell.

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This story was published on Medium also.