David Empey

There is a hilarious ‘Speed Bump’ cartoon in today’s Globe & Mail. It depicts a man standing in front of the door to the National Association of Telemarketers. A sign beside the door warns “No Solicitors”. Irony indeed.

I try to be at least pleasant to telemarketers when they call. And they call a lot – hardly a day goes by without at least one call. Sometimes it’s a cold call (a horrible way to make a living), but often it is from an organization I support – a charity, political or social organization, or some such. Oddly, it annoys be more when it is from one of these organizations – it seems at least a bit like betrayal.

But it is more than just the calls. Most of the mail I get goes directly to the recycling box because it aims to sell me something. And, interesting, I can detect changes in where they come from when I make a new donation. Donate to a nature organization, and you’ll be inundated with mail from dozens of them.

And then there is SPAM email. I have 6 email addresses between home and work, and I get hundreds of such messages every day. And some of them would embarrass… well, you get the idea.

On one hand, I understand that all of this activity happens because it works: Some people respond by buying what is offered. But the rest of us pay the price. There are ways you can limit some of this activity – you can have a service installed on your phone line to prevent telemarketing calls. But you have to pay for it. And we all pay more – for internet services, for example – because so much bandwidth is used to carry SPAM.

Surely it is reasonable to expect not to be inundated with unwanted advertisements. I don’t pretend to know what can be done to stop all this – short of making these activities illegal, an untenable solution. But not responding to these calls, mails, and emails is a good start.