The WAL

Needs to be taken off your list, dammit!

People calling me trying to sell me something or tell me I’ve won something is bad enough.  Computers doing it irritates the hell out of me.  There’s no satisfaction in saying, “No thank you,” to a machine and hanging up on it.  There isn’t that much going it to a human being either because the poor sod on the other end is just doing their job, although I’d suggest they might try to find another and stop interrupting my dinner.  But having a computer do the dialing, <sigh>.

I can picture the reasoning: efficiency.  More people annoyed per hour.  I expect phone soliciting has a very low success rate, but if you can call more people per hour, and I’ll bet a decent computer can even call several people at once, that low success rate translates into more sales which you can patch through to one of your far fewer live operators.  Voila!  More profit.

More general societal stress, too.  It’s not like you can call the computer back while it’s having dinner, but that’s when most people are home to answer the phone, right?  It’s like audio spam, but the only filter is to screen your calls.  real spam, you can just delete, and junk mail can be sent along to other companies who are dumb enough to include postage paid envelopes with their junk mail.

Yes, I do that.  It doesn’t take much time or effort and it amuses me to think of the entertainment the people in their mail rooms get when they recieve their own envelopes back stuffed as full as I can make them with other people’s junk mail.  Who knows, maybe they find something they need once in a while.

But I’m not ever going to buy something over the phone and what makes any marketing genius think that people will believe a recorded voice telling them that they’ve won a trip to Hawaii?  Idiots.  Let me eat my food while it’s still luke warm without having to explain to my kids every single time that it’s just another computer and let the machine get it.

When I come out of a store to find something yellow stuck under my windshield wiper, I expect it to be a parking ticket. Not that I want a parking ticket, and I certainly don’t expect one in a parking lot, but it’s what society has trained me to expect. Parking tickets irritate me, but what I found yesterday coming out of a large store was far worse.

I knew before I got to my car that it wasn’t a ticket because everyone’s car had one. You’d have to be really busy and really bored to ticket several hundred people at once. On retrieval, I found it was a coupon for the Subway that just opened across the parking lot. This is wrong on so many levels. Aside from wasting people’s time and irritating them in general, it’s a horrible waste of treeflesh. How many pieces of that yellow paper wound up on the ground, or worse yet in a garbage can? And you paid someone to irritate a parking lot full of people. How is this good for your brand new business?

Am I overreacting? I can’t be the only one who thinks this is more obnoxious than junk mail. I thought this kind of advertising disappeared in the seventies. Obviously, someone didn’t get the memo.  At least it wasn’t for a telephone psychic.