stop getting junk mail

After a few years of doggedness on my part, my junk mail has pretty well dried up. Hooray!

About a year and a half ago we asked Qwest to knock it off with the phone books by calling them at 1-800-422-8793. It worked. I’m hoping it works as well with Verizon.

It was, again, surprisingly easy. I called Verizon’s directory department at 1-800-888-8448 and gave my name, number, and address to a slightly surprised-sounding customer service rep. (”You don’t want phone books?” he clarified carefully.) I encourage anybody who’s tired of the big paper phone bricks to give the companies a call. They do have ways to ensure that you don’t get the phone books; they just don’t advertise the fact. The hold time wasn’t even that bad.

I’m still plugging away. I made the mistake of subscribing to Yoga Journal last year and did not get on the “don’t release my address” list quickly enough. Now I get catalogs that aim to sell me fifty-dollar face cream. Are they nuts? Sheesh.

My friends, all of whom have learned to live with junk mail, humor me. “I’d stay away for a few days,” they whisper. “Yes, another catalog. You know how she gets.” But of all the junk mail in the world, Time Warner’s riles me for reasons that go beyond the aforementioned statistics. Corporate America may not think twice about deforesting the entire planet in service of its marketing agenda, but I don’t want any part of this dastardly scheme. I just had a baby; I want her to grow up in a world where plant life still exists in a recognizable form. I can picture a conversation when she’s older:

“Yes, honey,” I’ll say, brandishing a catalog, “this is a tree. Of course, in my day, trees looked different—they grew out of the ground, and were covered with little green things called ‘leaves’.”

Today I called Continental Properties, which keeps sending us glitzy mailers advertising yuppie condominiums we will never buy. Seriously, there’s not a chance. It’s my firm intention never to move again.

The woman on the phone seemed so confused. You do not want our mail? People do not want our mail? But we send it to, you know, whole zip codes. How can this be? Whatever does this mean?

I wish zillions of us would pick up the phone when we got junk mail and politely inform the companies that we didn’t want it. It would swiftly become less lucrative for companies to send stuff to people who don’t request it. But there’s always so much to do, and you never really know how long it’ll take.

Today I called Verizon Wireless to get off their solicitations list, and boy, was it a pain. The customer service representative told me that I was the first person he’d ever talked to who wanted off the lists, and I can see why.

First I called the telemarketing people, whose number is in big red print on the promotional mailing I got today. They sent me to customer service: 1-800-922-0204. At that number I had to press #, 4, 4, and then ignore the voice that told me to enter my Verizon Wireless number. After a while, the hold music came on (from “The Nutcracker”) and I talked to a nice guy who told me that he didn’t think Verizon had any mailing lists. Well, we straightened that out, but it took him a while to find the screen that let him put our information on the Verizon do-not-annoy lists.

Supposedly I will stop receiving those rassenfrassen “courtesy checks” within four weeks.

Apparently, according to state law, I cannot opt out of receiving paper credit card statements. Bah. I do all my credit-card banking online, and I’d rather not have anybody fishing my CC statement out of my mailbox. Nothing to do about that but write my state representative, I guess.

In addition to the junk that comes in the mail, I get a lot of flyers on my front porch from roving real estate agents. Today I put in a knock-it-off call to David Wemer, who’d left a flyer and a good-for-nothing magnet, the floppy printed kind that’s too weak to hold any papers to the fridge. At least the flyer was recyclable. I have nothing good to say about the magnet.

It took about three months, but it looks like I’m no longer getting that big unwieldy fistful of flyers every week from ADVO/Shopwise.

Man. I can hardly believe how much junk mail I get. It just keeps coming.

Today I wrote to the creationist anti-homosexual Lutheran church up the street which keeps sending me mail inviting me to their 15-week class. I hope they honor my request. They are “an outreach oriented church,” all het up to “reach out to those without Christ.” This sentiment of theirs does not exactly inspire me to neighborly tolerance and goodwill, but I was civil.

And today I called Greenlight Financial. I’m just going to call to request no more mail every time I get junk mail with a toll-free number on it. Maybe it won’t work, but at least I’ll have been a little bit of a pest.