With the social work placement over and the dissertation being politely ignored in the hope it gets bored and goes away, I can get back to a bit more of the old actual do-gooding. We start with a Butterfly I should have either buttered or flied years ago: saving paper and therefore trees and therefore the world by telling junk mail to piss off.
We’ve been getting a lot of junk mail here at Zero Towers, and very little of it has been demographically appropriate. I’m not interested in an over-50s singles holiday, thanks, I’m not looking to score with my mum’s friends. I don’t need a credit card, I’ve got enough debt to keep me busy for the next couple of decades. And I don’t need a loan, although I see where you’re coming from with that. We’re getting tons of this stuff. Some of it’s for the woman who sold the place three years ago and, worse, unlike your well-intentioned spam, none of it is offering to help with my tiny, malfunctioning penis.
But this not my burden to bear alone. Estimates reckon in the UK we each get about 450 bits of junk mail every year, adding up to about 80,000 tonnes of wasted paper and an assload of wasted energy going into its production. People, this has to stop. I’ve signed up to the Mail Preference Service. This is the direct mail industry’s way of getting you off their mailing lists, getting their clag off your doormats and getting trees kept in the ground. I’ve also listed the previous owner as having moved out, thus reducing the amount of junk mail we get by approximately 6000 percent. Apparently she spent her days signing up to catalogues and donating to those sleazy charities that emotionally blackmail you into donating by sending you foreign currency and saying they’re running out. That done, I went to the Royal Mail website, using the Internet and an Internet browser, to join their list and have them stop delivering unaddressed mail. In theory at least, this should get shot of most of my 450 bits of junk mail and my share of the 80,000 tonnes we’re due this year.
The results are threefold: first I will save millions of paper; second, I will help dozens of postal staff be fired; and third, I’ll feel like a complete loser when I realise I never get any non-junk mail mail. The downside, of course, is if all my loyal followers remove themselves from mailing lists, Royal Mail will lose millions of pounds worth of business from direct mail companies and have to do something drastic to make up the shortfall, like raising the price of stamps by 30 percent like they’re running some sort of mega-capitalist’s wank fantasy. My apologies.
Photo credit: The Zero
