We’ve all gotten them. Thick envelopes that looks really important. The serious nature of the envelope, the unfamiliar return address, the somber way your name glowers up at you from under the heavy duty shine of the clear plastic window, cause your heart to hammer and sweat to pour down your back. You throw the envelope on the table and stare at it, half expecting it to grow teeth. What is it you wonder as you tip toe away, a really big unpaid bill you somehow forgot to pay, bad news from the Internal Revenue Service, a notice warning about the inevitable destruction of the planet. You don’t have the faintest idea. You are pretty sure that you don’t want to know. You spend the next few days slinking past the envelope you decide that whoever came up with expression that ignorance was bliss must have been facing one of these envelopes.
Finally you can’t take it anymore. You grab the envelope and rip it open. Reaching in with shaky fingers you pull out…pages and pages of brightly colored papers.
Credit card offers!
Everywhere we turn they are being shoved in our faces. Elaborately done commercials on television, brightly painted billboards along the highway, filling up the pages of magazines, discreetly tucked in the bank tellers cubicle, pop up’s all over the internet, and disguised as potential doom in the mailbox. Exactly how many credit cards do the companies think you need anyway?
The ones that are really disturbing are the ones that really irritate us are the ones that the Postal Service delivers. The rest we can ignore. In the new age of credit card fraud and identity theft you are going to be forced to run it through the shredder and bury it in the nastiest batch of trash you can find, and that still might not be enough to discourage a really determined person from digging it out and painstakingly taping the pieces of paper together.
This particular credit card offer, with its ominous vibes has cost you years of life. And look they included one of those handy pre-sorted envelopes. The urge to rip the packet of papers into a thousand pieces of confetti and shove it all into the complimentary envelope is overwhelming. Maybe you’ll even rip up some pieces of notebook paper to add to it, that way when they open it back at the headquarters the envelope will explode and the confetti will cover the office.
While that option will make you feel better it won’t stop the offers from filling your mailbox. Plus is it really fair to take out your frustration on the data entry person and custodial staff? They’re just doing their jobs.
The best course of action is to run the entire contents of the envelope through the shredder. Then call the credit card company and politely ask to be removed from their mailing list. Be prepared, just because you have asked to be removed from he list does not mean the offers will automatically stop coming. Chances are that the company has an entire warehouse full of offers with your name on them. It’ll take awhile for all of them to be mailed. Give it six months, if after that point you are still receiving the offers, try again.
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