Rick Nelson and Claude Peck dispense unasked-for advice about clothing, etiquette, culture, relationships, grooming and more.
CP: Normally, getting daily unwanted communications from someone you don’t know is grounds for reporting a stalker to the cops. So should I seek a restraining order on Hillary Clinton? What about the individual calling himself, creepily, TravelMole?
RN: Don’t get me started. I’ll drop into Target every few weeks for H&B stock-ups, but I’m not particularly interested in finding the Bull’s-Eye in my daily e-mail feed.
CP: At least you might get a coupon out of Tar-zhay. But thus far I have done nothing I know of that would make me want to “rework my pencil skirt,” or buy “the world’s most comfortable support stocking.”
RN: Well, other than age. Which, I might point out, you are doing rather splendidly. See, I can be nice.
CP: You are so nice that I’m going to share you with my good friend in Lithuania who has a very legit-sounding business proposal — to do with trading foreign currencies via Skype.
RN: Gee, thanks. Hey, at least you’re not being inundated with offers to extend the subscription of a magazine — remember them? — one that isn’t due to expire for another year. Enough already.
CP: I have a decent spam catcher on my work e-mail, but Tom, Dick and Harry all seem to know a highly effective workaround.
RN: Here’s my memo to LinkedIn: Dear LinkedIn Member: I’ve already received your other three e-mail reminders, asking me to “connect” with you. Thanks. I’m not a member of LinkedIn. Sincerely, Rick Nelson.
CP: Be glad you never linked yourself to LinkedIn. Checking it occasionally, to try and dampen the noise it makes in my in-box, I have never seen a single person find a single job or promotion via that site. But then, I never was much for the whole “networking” thing.
RN: There goes my image of you in the 1980s, in a boxy navy suit and an orange-and-blue tie, mingling at a Meet Macalester mixer.
CP: Not me. The one time I ventured to my alma mater for a reunion, I walked into the fieldhouse, took one look around, and ran directly back to my Dodge Dart.
RN: Ugh, school reunions. Thanks, but no thanks. Which reminds me, somehow my fraternity keeps finding me online, even after I click on the “unsubscribe” response on the e-mails it showers upon its former members.
CP: Unsubscribe has the staying power of Zsa Zsa Gabor in marriage. Meantime, Give to the Max Day is a worthwhile idea, but one wishes it didn’t also require every tiny nonprofit under creation to E-mail to the Max.
RN: I hate to say this, particularly while speaking in hashtag, but #firstworldproblems.
CP: I specialize in those. In part, I suppose, because I live in the First World.
RN: Well, Citizen First, there are worse things than wrestling with spam. For instance, there’s our employer’s frustrating e-mail system, which has the storage capacity of a newborn’s bladder.
CP: Sorry, I’ve drifted off. Gotta read up on National Turn Signal Day.
E-mail: witheringglance@startribune.com
Twitter: @claudepeck and @RickNelsonStrib
