Spam. Spam. Spam. Spam.
Posted by Paul Woodhouse at October 22nd, 2004
We always know when things go a little quiet in our neck of the woods. We’re suddenly inundated with sales reps. They ring, they pop in, they send you stuff through the post, but they very rarely pester us via email. Obviously I regard this as a boon as it’s bad enough wading through all the usual spam nonsense just to find an enquiry.
It’s just a common factor with all business repelling all forms of spam. Spam email, spam phone calls, spam faxes and spam cold-calling. It’s too Monty Python to be funny. But when you consider that 40% of all email is the average spam quotient for most companies it get’s silly. It gets even sillier when you consider that maybe 40% of our phone calls are some form of spam and 60% of our faxes too. (And I’m not including legit sales rep calls here).
All this and we’ve even signed up to the Telephone Preference Service. All in all, it probably wastes an hour or two of my day to be a general spam junk filter. And if we consider that as a general secretarial duty, that’s possibly £10 a day, £50 a week, £2500 a year. (If we were to take my hourly rate into the equation, the figure would be too frightening to imagine!). I could also be a really tight Northerner and claim fax ink and paper costs.
But as much as I might bemoan the time stolen through all this, it’s something that I don’t have the time to sort out. Am I really going to send all those faxes back to their originators to cancel at £1.50 a min – no. Am I really going to engage Telesales reps in conversation about wasting my time – no. I appreciate they are only trying to earn themselves a living, so I politely ensure them I’m not the person they need to speak to.
But if anybody has been forwarded $44,000,000 from a Korean Banker operating out of Lesotho after Mr. Andrew Phillips died in a ghastly plane crash…..could they lend me a fiver?
