Two weeks ago, I received an email from a Doctor G Neil Martin.
Hi Neil
It’s Neil Martin. I thought your Neilz Beanz tinz were brilliant.
Can I buy one?
Look forward to hearing from you.
Best,
Neil
Now, as you might imagine, being Neil Martin myself, I found this email to be quite odd. It’s not every day you get emailed by a Neil Martin. I have to admit that I was a little suspicious at first. I thought perhaps it was some sort of spam, scraping my name from somewhere on my site, but the email had an attached signature, identifying Neil Martin as the “Research Degrees Coordinator” at Middlesex University. The email address also had a Middlesex University extension. Curious to find out more, I replied and sure enough, I got a human response from Doctor G Neil Martin asking again for some tins. Three to be exact. I asked how he had managed to stumble across my site.
In a typically narcissistic, Google-driven way, I sometimes search for any new comments on my books and papers (if you type in neil martin and psychology/middlesex in Amazon/Google, you’ll see what I do) and came across the Royal Mail stamps designs and then got the the actual website.
I explained to Neil that although I was more than happy to send him some tins, the labels and postage actually cost more than the beans themselves! He was very happy to reimburse me for this, though and so I went to the post office with three tins of beans, ready to post.
The last time I posted the tins, I posted six of them, all at once to different design agencies. The postage was attached to the bottom of the tins. Although I got some funny looks from the cashier, they were happy to let me send them as is and so I thought it’d be fine to do the same this time as well. Not so it seemed. In fact, I had to 20 minutes while the manager of the post office called up Royal Mail HQ to ask if I could send them as is. The ultimate answer was no. This really disappointed me as they were happy to send six previously! Reluctantly, I stuck them in a box instead and sent them that way, although it took a while to peel all of the stamps back off the tins!
Thankfully, Neil received all of the tins with no problems. He was even kind enough to send me a photo of them:
