If you are considering doing your duty as a patriotic American and exercising your right to make your voice heard, here are some simple guidelines to make yourself as annoying as humanly possible when writing your Congressperson:

1. Don't pick one issue. Shoot for at least 14. This makes it impossible for the legislative staff to send you a form letter.

2. While you're at it, write paragraph-long sentences and use no punctuation so picking out your 14 issues is torture.

3. Hand write your name and address messy enough that it takes 40 minutes to decipher but not so illegibly that they can quickly dismiss it as unreadable and shred it.

4. Live in the middle of nowhere so that your address resembles an obscure mathematical language (W123F2 109th county road F19) that makes Mapquest shortcircuit.

5. Request information on several different bills, including the full text of each, so they have to contact several different agencies to assemble the right materials.

6. Demand a signed photo and 67 copies of the Constitution.

7. Fabricate a really convincing lie about knowing the Congresswoman personally so it takes a week of careful fact-checking to discover the truth so the letter can be addressed appropriately.

8. Reference an obscure law that profoundly affects your life so the staff has to learn its every nuance in order to properly respond.

9. Be just nice enough after all your demands to make them feel bad if they start to curse your difficult-to-spell name


Trust me, follow these simple rules, and everyone in the office will have your name committed to memory. You will haunt their dreams. You will be legend.