paper view

sick and tired of "pre-approved" credit card offers via mail? after all the rejections (3, i think) during my first year as a permanently-employed, tax-paying resident, i have been deluged with credit card offers from all over in the last 3 years. few times, i succumb to the temptation. but most of the time, its a waste of paper. it even necessitated me buying a shredder with the onset of identity theft (a by-product of capitalism and democracy; nobody even thought of that phenomenon during the days of bartering deer meat for a sack of grain).

with all these paper-nalia, i have to diligently separate the pages with my name on it (for shredding) from the generic flyers and inserts. a couple of years ago, i started to turn the tables on these guys by mailing the included self-addressed no-stamp-needed envelope back to the banks (which contained their own inserts and assorted papyrus junk). since they already factored the return postage in the cost of mass-mailing offers to people, it just makes sense to send it back, whether you accepted the offer or not. trying to get yourself off the mailing list is a lot more hassle than you think it is. why not just send their junk back to them? this is just like AOL forcibly shoving their useless CDs of free trial internet connections upon us - we don't need that crap. sending back documents is one thing, but sending back a CD is a different story. a couple of creative campaigns had someone soliciting all your unwanted AOL CDs and supposedly send them back in bulk to AOL offices, and some people just wanted them for ehem, ... art's sake. so what we've also proven here is that they all lied when they said they will never share your information with anyone else.

so for a couple of years it worked. am sure other people have been doing the same thing for years now, and i can imagine some staffer open these envelopes and curse a blue streak. i rarely see AOL CDs in my mailbox anymore.

and then somebody wised up. in the last 12 months, i've noticed that some of the self-addressed no-stamp-needed envelopes now sported a "customer locator" barcode with some numbers. presumably if i sent back junk to them, they can trace it back to me (even without my name anywhere), and who knows if they might bring some trumped-up charges against me to say, attempting to defraud the bank, or illegally use bank property. whatever.



so we now have to be careful sending back their junk, hahaha. hey, maybe i can cut out that section on the envelope and still manage to send it back. yeah, that'll do it. damn these bastards. wasting my time.