Thursday Thoughts From Tesla

I spent much of this week “alone” at the office, so Tesla decided to come along and keep me company there.

Yesterday morning we received a filing back from the Sacramento courts in one of the self-addressed, stamped envelopes the office sends along with mail-in filings. Its delivery prompted Tesla to ask whether we made a habit of mailing official letters to ourselves. (In a tone which implied my intelligence might be in question.)

When I explained the situation – that the letter was actually a SASE sent along with a standard filing – he pondered the envelope with a thoughtful expression that suggested his mental snarks were rattling their cages.

Wisely, I walked away.

A few minutes later he poked his head into my office and said, “I wonder what the post office would do if you left a self-addressed letter on the table for pickup.”

“They’d take it to the post office and mail it back,” I said, “though our carrier would probably ask if we really intended that before she took it.”

“Right …” Tesla said, “but what if, when it returned, you refused delivery and marked the letter ‘return to sender’ … would it create an infinite loop?”

Leave it to my son to devise the postal equivalent of dividing by zero.