Here comes the Boy

By Paul Flower on Dec 10, 08 12:41 PM

Boy George stuck a male escort in handcuffs, hit him with chains and left him shackled to the wall. Sounds like an average day in the life. Let's face it, if he really wanted to torture the guy, he'd just have locked him in a room with Culture Club's greatest hits on repeat: maybe just the two songs - 'War (is stupid)' and 'Karma Chameleon' on permanent playback.

Please forgive my flippancy, in his defence George alleged that the escort was 'hacking into his laptop'. At this point all of those who rely on computers in order to earn a crust instantly forgave him.

For us home-workers, contractors and freelancers the laptop or PC is our lifeline. This effectively puts hackers, spammers and virus-spreaders on our shit list, somewhere alongside the Inland Revenue, red-tape wielding bureaucrats and traffic wardens. Some things are a given.

In common with most of those who spend upwards of 8 hours in front of a screen (daytime TV viewing doesn't count), I have about five or six different e-mail accounts, three of which I use on a very regular basis. One of these is so bulging with old e-mail that I simultaneously desire and dread the free-time to be able to clean it out.

The last time I gave this some thought I berated myself with the detail - 1978 should only be a year, not the quantity of mail in your inbox. Unfortunately there's now more than two thousand e-mails in there awaiting that down-time between Xmas and New Year when I might finally get the chance to purge it.

I suspect that almost 80% of the 2k+ have some important information in them somewhere, or info that was important at that point in time. Obviously there may be some duplication as we all now fire e-mail back and forth like some pointless, drunken conversation, but I do know where the delete button is, honest.

The greater problem is the unwanted stuff, the mail that piles up if you ever leave your computer for longer than 20 minutes. Last Monday was apparently the busiest on-line shopping day of the year, which is a fine example of the times we live in. Unfortunately all of those shops will now pester you to spend more money there, as you'll invariably fail to notice whether you have to opt-in or opt-out of receiving multiple reminders and offers that are of no interest to you whatsoever.

Last week I decided to keep a seven day log of shop-spam, mails from retailers that fester like blackheads in the pores of your personal mail. How often do these automated-mail-bots infest you with repeated discount offers and other nonsense - quite a lot, it seems.

My top repeat-offender was a company called VistaPrint. Yes, I'd recently bought a very cheap photo calendar from them and was extremely happy with the purchase - so much so that I credited them in my facebook profile. I'm less happy that they now send me almost an e-mail every day, six in the last week.

In joint second were Amazon & Figleaves. I have bought a lot from Amazon, back to the earliest days of online retailing. Do they really need to send me four e-mails in a week to remind me that they exist? Ditto Figleaves from whom I twice bought some lingerie (not for me, I hasten to add - before Boy George gets interested). Lagging slightly behind were Play.com and SavileRow, both on three followed closely by Waterstone's, PayPal and Tesco on two.

Eight retailers, twenty six e-mails. As traditional advertising methods seem to be fading into oblivion I'm sure that online retailers must be recognising some returns from this annoying nagging of their client base. Personally I feel that this kind of traffic will inevitably lead to the collapse of the internet, or at the very least our reliance upon it - who can afford the time to wade through such traffic?

As soon as I have the time I'll be hitting the unsubscribe button, pulling the plug on pester power. If they don't stop at that point I'll just have to send the Boy round.

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