Ambiguous Mailbox Flag Confounds, Ostracizes Area Man

HADDON, NJ - Homeowners in the quiet Silver Pines development were shocked yesterday by the appearance of an ambiguous mailbox flag and the untold havoc it caused.

Mailbox owner Harold Buldrick was furious. "Damn you, careless postman on my route, damn you to zip code 666...uh...85!" Buldrick was bewildered. "What does it mean?? It is neither up nor down -- have you delivered my mail or not! The entire efficiency of communication inherent in the up-down system is lost by this half-way, half-assed handling of my mailbox! Is There No Justice?!!!"

The ambiguity of the status of Buldrick's mail had thorny quantum-mechanical repercussions. Buldrick's neighbor, physicist Craig Newblum, was afraid to touch the mailbox for fear of destroying the "unresolved fields of probability," as he called them. "It's like Schrodinger's Cat. Old Mr. Schrodinger down the street came home one day and found a note on his mailbox saying some cocky punks had stuffed his cat in his mailbox along with a cyanide capsule that had a fifty-fifty chance of exploding. Mr. Schrodinger figured that if he never opened the box then it could never be said that Mittens was dead, so he's never opened his mailbox since ... But you can smell it up and down the street, it's definitely dead."

Unfortunately, what happened to Mr. Buldrick was much, much worse. As soon as Buldrick opened his mailbox to determine whether his mail had come or not, the probability fields indeed resolved and it was determined for all to see that Buldrick had, in fact, received the latest issue of Martha Stewart's Living. Buldrick dashed away as onlookers cried "Out, out, demon!" -- he shall never be cool, ever again.







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