BaronEngel
patreon
Seeking Perspective
🕑 Added 2017-07-21 22:46:43 +0000 UTC Neither Rainbow Dash or I got much accomplished that day at work in my Equestria dreamscape. After a several dozen letters The Good. The Bad. The Weird it all started blurring together into a jumble of words. With some of those words not being very flattering.Eventually I was able to convince the Element of Loyalty to not open all of them there in her office at Ponyville branch of REWS. Instead I told her to hold off dealing with her mail until tonight when we could do it over at the cottage. Thankfully RD was receptive to this idea.
Fortunately Dash had no actual weather assigned to herself today since her mind was not on her work. Another piece of good new was being able to connect Carousel in the marketplace when I dashed, pun intended, out to pick up lunch for Rainbow and I. She agreed to drop by the REWS offices with her cart and haul the gigantic sack of mail back to our cottage. Unfortunately in our hasty conversation she forgot to tell me about the significant piece of mail that had arrived at our household today. The Letter
So around 4 in the afternoon Carousel brought her cart by, and after much grunting and struggling we got postal bag into her cart. She headed off and at 5 Dash and I punched out for the day and headed for the cottage.
I had just planned on making sandwiches that evening for dinner so preparations we quick. In a short amount of time everypony was fed and we were able to tackle the mail. Petina and Carousel were impressed by the volume, but they quickly settled upon a plan of attack. With RD's okay we all started opening and giving the letters a quick reading over. This way all four of us could evaluate them and then triage them into four separate stacks, good, okay, bad, creepy. With this strategy we were able to burn through what ended up being over 450 letters.
When it was all done we were left with 4 stacks of letters. Fortunately the Good stack was the largest by a significant margin, with okay being number two and bad trailing a distant third. Only a dozen or so of the letters truly fell in creepy category and they were now impaled to the dining room table with one of my kitchen knives. Also Petina and Carousel were able to give RD a useful bit of advice.
"Dash, every good letter count as ten letters." Said Petina. "Count every bad letter as one, same for the okay letters. Folks often won't take the time to tell you've done a good job, but if they think you've screwed up they'll let you and every other pony know about it. We'll lump the okay letters the same way as the bad."
"What about the creepy ones?" Asked prismatic maned mare.
Carousel smiled. "The creepy ones are just that. Creepy. But they count as just ones."
Dash nodded her head. "You two have dealt with this before. What should I do with all of them?" She stare at the good stack and winced. "Do I have write back everyone of these fans thanking them? That'll take forever!"
Petina took a pull from her bottle of beer and then replied. "Dash you are under no obligation to write anypony back. These ponies wrote these unsolicited letters of their own free will. Nopony told them they had to do it. So if you don't feel like responding then don't."
The white unicorn levitated a letter from the good stack and stared at it for moment. "However some of these letters are very nice, and it wouldn't hurt to write a few thank you letters back to your fans. A little good will can do a long ways at times. Also you might want to keep some of the best ones as mementos"
RD smiled. "Okay, I think I'll do that." She leaned over and hugged Petina. "Thanks everypony for helping me with this! So how's every other ponies day been?"
Carousel and Petina looked at each. "Actually there's something Carousel and I need to discuss with you and Brick."
To be continued.
Comments
Baron Engel
No the creepy letters were creepy even for Petina. In our modern world they'd be "Send to the FBI and local law enforcement grade stuff."
McClaw
It's a good strategy, but you also want to assume it takes ten "good" letters to offset one "bad" one due to the effect of spreading the word. I also suspect Petina will want to go through the "creepy" letters for ideas. (BTW, nice strap-on knife and Sherlock Holmes reference in one.)
