baby baby baby noooooo

I have been meaning to relay this story for the past few weeks, but for some reason it kept slipping my mind when I went to blog--which makes no sense at all because it's one of the funnier things that has happened to me in recent memory. Anyway, this time I remembered.

One of the things I do as part of my job is to sort the mail that arrives at my building. We get a lot of junk mail and a lot of wrongly-addressed mail, but one day a few weeks ago, we started to get these letters addressed to Justin Bieber. As in, prepubescent Canadian teenybopper Justin Bieber. This guy:




Philadelphia is not Hollywood. Nor is it Canada. I don't know if Justin Bieber has ever been to Philadelphia, but he sure as shootin' has never been to 3320 Powelton Avenue, much less lived there. So you can imagine my surprise and amusement when these letters kept coming in. They were all written in grade-school handwriting ("to Justin Bieber form [sic] your fan"...aw). While I was never so underhanded as to open any of them, I did hold them up to the light to try to read what was inside. The best snippet: "I love that song Baby that you do with Ludacris, say hi to him if you can."

Yo hey, Ludacris, what's happening, man?


Aw hey, Justin, what's shakin'? Your balls dropped yet?


No, still waitin', but Janine from W.D. Sugg Elementary School says hi.


Oh, word.


And I'm not kidding about the name of the school, either. All of the letters came in pre-printed envelopes with the return address of the school. W.D. Sugg Elementary School, in Town-I've-Never-Heard-Of, Florida. Once we got more than three of these letters, I realized that this must have been some kind of class project--you know, hey kids! Let's all write to our favorite celebrities and develop our communication skills at the same time! So I felt really bad that these letters were ALL going to the wrong place--whoever had been in charge of finding out Justin Bieber's address must have somehow gotten misinformed by the internet (I know, right?? That never happens!) I did a quick search on Google for "Justin Bieber 3320 Powelton," and sure enough, a query came up under the "Cha-Cha" search engine for "what is Justin Bieber's real address?"

Can you imagine? In the whole vast internet, this one tiny section of Justin Bieber's fan base tried to find his address by typing in that specific phrase, and we got the letters instead. It turns out that there was once a Justin Bieber who lived in my building (I bet he loves having that name now); he was on the Drexel soccer team, and graduated in 2000 or 2001--in fact, on the address search, his age comes up as "30-32 years of age," but I guess the folks over at W.D. Sugg ignored that part. 


Anyway, I did call the school and spoke to a very nice lady in the front office, and hopefully she was able to find out which class had written the letters and set them straight. We haven't gotten any Bieber fan mail since, so I'd like to think that my detective work paid off. Justin Bieber, you're welcome.