As our dog is now in his senior years, it means more frequent need to go outside, and not always at the most optimal times. Of late, these calls of nature have been occurring in the middle of the night or in the very early mornings. Occasionally, he'll make quick work of it and come back to bed, sleeping soundly for several hours so Sari and I can piece together several hours of quality sleep. However, sometimes, it takes a bit longer, and whoever is on duty will be unable to return to our slumber, so we'll find something to do while the other snoozes away, undisturbed. This time, my activity of choice was sorting through a huge pile of junk mail, which had been accumulating for quite some time and was starting to take over both our kitchen counter and table.
Junk mail (or unsolicited mail) is hit or miss. I don't hate it 100%, because we sometimes get McDonalds coupons, hear about deals on custom framing, or learn about a new business opening in the area. We save a lot of the take-out menus for when "JustEat.com," doesn't cut it in terms of selection, and now and then, I'm inclined to browse through the community programming booklet for classes I probably won't take. For a good deal of this stuff, we can read it or toss it in the Recycling Bin. In fact, we keep one on our porch to quickly deal with flyers shoved in our door handles by local real estate agents and politicians. These are easy to handle.
It's the other kind I want to talk about. The junk mail that is personalized, to us, with our full name and address. I don't know where they got this information (likely purchased by a third-party), but these are usually of zero interest to me. A seemingly endless barrage of Credit Card and Internet Service Providers won't stop at just sending a general flyer, oh no, they want to give it a personal touch. Not just on the address portion either, but they will actually personalize form letters inside, as well, to let you know that they really want to be your friend (in the same way that a telemarketer will repeatedly use your first name when you are foolish enough to agree to hear what they have to say--and regret it seconds later, not to mention wince whenever this complete stranger says your first name like you've known each other for years).
Last year, the Canadian Federal Government passed the highly controversial anti-spam legislation (CASL), requiring businesses to re-confirm with their entire customer base that they would, in fact, like to continue receiving email communication and promotion. Essentially, this means that customers that businesses who spent money (in some cases) to get these contacts WITH CONSENT were now in a position that they had to awkwardly email these individuals to ask, "so...umm...we still cool? 'Cause if not, you can, like, unsubscribe...and...we'll, ummm, stop sending you the stuff that you asked us to send you in the first place...so...uh...yeah...hope we can still be friends."
This process was not only frustrating for businesses, but resulted in a HUGE spike of junk email from companies all doing the same thing to comply with the legislation (or face hefty fines). All to protect people from promotional info that THEY AUTHORIZED! Meanwhile, male enhancement offers and pleas from Nigerian Princes go unchecked, because these are sent mostly from zombie accounts from overseas, and aren't going to be held accountable by legislation in Canada, because there are just too many of these being reported for officials to make any headway.
In any case, dealing with email, solicited or otherwise, is simple. If it's a company you don't want to hear from anymore, you click the "unsubscribe" button and other than the occasional, "we're sorry to lose you, " email, that's it. If it's the Prince of Nigeria and you doubt his credentials, you just hit the "Report Spam" button (which I'm convinced doesn't actually do anything but delete the email) and you won't get any more...from that address (plenty more from other scamsters!).
Email doesn't take up physical space (unless you have an urge to print all your emails...why would you do that?). Physical mail does. Either on the counter, table or in the recycling bin, it's something you are forced to deal with. The personalized stuff is the worst. THE WORST. Not only do you have something you don't want, but it has personal information printed on it. Because we don't want to attract additional unwanted attention, now we have to ensure that this info doesn't get out. So we have to shred it. We have to buy a shredder. We have to purchase a piece of equipment specifically to deal with something dumped on us without request or permission (kind of like a snow shovel, but nature serves a purpose and snow is just a drawback). Not only do we have to buy a piece of equipment, we have to spend time actually using it. So now, we're out both money AND time for something we don't event want. The other solution is calling the offending companies and asking them not to send you stuff but I don't have the luxury of taking a month off to make all these calls (nor should I have to) and face further irritation as I'm transferred through multiple departments who don't make notes on the call.
If there is legislation on spam email (which is really just a minor inconvenience, most of the time), why not on physical junk-mail? In addition to the annoyances of requiring a shredder, isn't it more
disturbing to receive unsolicited communication at your place of residence than your email inbox? Even tele-scammers trying to gain access to your computer by claiming that your system is unstable is more unnerving than some moron asking for money-laundering assistance while masquerading as African royalty). The verdict, at least from my point of view, is that I would rather have 100 male enhancement offers in my Junk folder (because again, technology tends to sort things for us--I'll talk about the "Other" folder in Facebook Messenger later) than one more credit card offer that I have to shred and dispose of, physically.
