I'm not overly keen on advertising at the best of times. I certainly dislike advertising that I haven't invited or accepted in some way, like junk mail or spam. I absolutely despise intrusive, invasive advertising and marketing that interrupt my life. Telesales are criminal in my world view. If I wanted a mortgage, I'd go to the bank, not sit around scratching my arse waiting for the phone to ring, thank you very much.
Far worse than all of these, though admittedly rarer, are the deviants that spam fax machines. My parents have a fax machine, which my dad originally got for business reasons a few years back, but which is hardly used these days. It sits around and serves as a phone in his study. Recently they have had to outright disable the fax receiving capabilities as people have started sending out junk faxes about time shares and polls on this, that and the other, usually in the hope that you'll call some premium rate phone number and they'll make cash from the call or something.
Consider these various methods of marketing:
- Spam e-mail can be downloaded relatively quickly for those in the broadband world, and can be deleted fairly painlessly, or filtered away.
- Junk mail can be shredded and recycled, and you can call someone and tell them you want to be taken off their list.
- Telesales people can be told to take you off their list, or you can apply to the Telephone Preference Service to avoid being added to lists in the first place.
On the other hand, faxes are slow, they tie up your phone line for a long time, they use your paper and toner, and it's almost impossible to get off their lists.
So why, you may ask, am I going on about this? Well, because some dumbass has been spamming our phone line for months now, trying to fax us junk. The phone rings, but when you pick it up there's just an intermittent beep while their machine (or computer) waits for a fax response. We can't get their number and they seemingly don't care that we're ex-directory and have applied to the TPS.
Fiends.
This morning we got a call at 6am, an hour before we normally wake up. There it was, beeping away at us.
WE DON'T EVEN HAVE A FAX MACHINE
