Here are a couple of things that I need to get off my chest before the weekend.
Crap Faxes at work. Man these guys are relentless. It doesn’t matter if laws are passed that require the “fax-er” to provide a phone number to call for removal. I’ve done this and I still get faxes. Faxes for vacation get-aways, faxes from equity groups, faxes from mortgage firms, faxes from business seminars. I’ve been keeping my faxes. The business seminar faxes say (in small print) “check this box and fax back if you no longer want to be contacted…” So I check the box with a big marker and fax back. I still get 2-3 faxes PER DAY from them. Now I fax back every sheet I’ve collected and add the new one to the stack. Today I faxed back 6 pages (from a 3 day period). At the top of two of them I wrote in bold marker “Att’y Gen’l Office”. My understanding is that these slimy companies actually out-source their dirty work to other slimy companies that do the faxing. The hard part is identifying the company doing the faxing. They obviously aren’t checking the database of numbers of folks who want to be removed. That’s just a smoke screen to comply with unsolicited fax laws.
Some simple math on my end. Two faxes per day from one company = 730 sheets of paper per year. With the cost of toner added in you can expect to pay 3-5 cents per fax page. That adds up to $30.00 per year – conservatively. Now if you have 5-6 companies hounding you each day you’re looking at $175 bones a year, flushed down the crapper equaling 4,380 sheets or 9 reams of paper!. If you are a small business or a home based business, this REALLY sucks.
These slime-balls are chewing through a a lot of trees with this waste.
Secondly. Telemarketing phone calls coming into our workplace are substantial too. I’ve finally come up with a “recipe” for dealing with them. I shot 4 of them down yesterday. These are the companies that call 2-3 times a day, ask for so-and-so and won’t leave messages on their voice mail (I don’t transfer calls directly to the employee). Fed up, I now ask if the have a call back number so the employee can return the call (the answer is always “No”). Then I instruct them that if they don’t have a call back number they need to remove us from their data base. I think I may have more luck with this than the fax scenario. Time will tell.
Lastly. I hate it when people give me a phone number and don’t phrase the numbers in a 3-3-4 rhythm just like they are printed on every singe page of every phone book across the land. Normal phrasing: 555 [pause] 222 [pause] 1234. I had someone give me their number today in a 3-4-3 phrasing. AHHRRGH! 555 [pause] 2221 [pause] 234. This is so awkward I don’t know how they do it. I would have to practice this in order to get it right. Of course there are variations on this theme also.
