Saturday, July 31, 2004

Ow. Ow. Ow. My knee is fucking killing me. Why? Well, it's not like I've fallen on it or injured it or done any strenuous or knee-intensive exercise... unless you count working on my feet seven days straight for eight hours a day, of course. Yes, I should have kept up with my exercise routine, I haven't been to the gym once over the summer. But I'm just thinking about it now, and this is the first job I've had where I spent eight hours a day (minus 2 breaks so short they don't really count) on my feet. All my other jobs have either been part time, or allowed plenty of time to sit and relax, or both. Unless ibuprofen can work miracles, forget an eight hour day for me - I'll be lucky if I make it through four.

Thursday I sent out ten trays or so - between 1000 and 3000 letters - to Vermont. When I got to towns where I knew people I checked the names more carefully. It turns out I sent out half a dozen pieces of junk mail to people I knew, or if not them then their parents. I'm sorry, Diane Sardonis.

I feel dirty.

Also, out of curiosity I've kept track of my counts every day. Some days I forgot to write it down and had to make a rough guess later, but still. From the Friday I started to this past Thursday, I mailed roughly 160,150 applications for a credit card extension scam or whatever you'd call it from Chase bank. It would take less than seven weeks for me to send out one million pieces of junk mail. And "junk" is the word. At least 95 percent of people getting these will throw them out on sight. And at least half of those who actually accept the offer will wish they hadn't.

It's got me thinking environmentally. I've been making plans for an effort to boycott companies that send you junk mail, which would be accompanied by a pledge not to use spam filters on e-mail accounts. That way companies have a legitimate way to reach customers without needing to waste paper or try to be misleading about who they are, and they wouldn't have to worry about their competitors getting all the junk mail business (however much that is) because their competitors would just get boycotted. Because think about it - if you have the boycott alone, then companies wouldn't like that but they'd still need some way to reach their market. So they'd just send out letters disguised to look like they're coming from someone else, or include the credit card offers with your normal bank statement or something. So that's why you need the "spam pledge" too. I still have a lot of details to work out, but if no one tells me a reason why it's impossible, expect to see an online campaign against junk mail some time relatively soon.

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