I had to go to the Registry of Deeds in Dedham today, and I got home about 2:30 in the afternoon. When I got out of the car, I happened to see an NSTAR car park a short distance away. NSTAR is the utility that provides electricity and natural gas. There were some NSTAR employees in the neighborhood a few weeks ago investigating a possible gas leak, and so I was curious to see where the person went. He or she (I couldn’t tell the gender for certain because it was raining and the person was wearing a hooded rain slicker) went to the house of one of my neighbors, rang the bell, and handed an orange envelope to the woman who answered the door. My guess is that a bill must be seriously past due. But I never heard of such a procedure for hand-delivering an orange envelope.
Quite a few years ago my law partner and I were getting two electric bills every month. (The electric company at that time was called Boston Edison.) One was for the suite we occupied, and so of course we paid that every month. Another was for a nearby suite that we did not occupy, and the electric company strangely refused to believe my phone calls and letters to the effect that we did not occupy the particular space. More than a year and a half went by until the electric company finally agreed to send out somebody to verify my assertions. And yet in all that time there were no orange envelopes. I wonder what one has to do to get an orange envelope.
The people who occupied the suite were a detective agency, a little bit louche in appearance. They certainly weren’t so attractive as the detectives in 77 Sunset Strip or Surfside 6. They didn’t even look so respectable as the detectives in Juliet of the Spirits.
