Do you ever long for the days when life was simpler? I truly miss the little moments of “free time” I used to have before:

junk mail
telemarketers
spam
paper shredding

Ironically, as personal computers began to appear in homes across the country, and a paperless society was predicted, the flood of junk mail continued to escalate to crazy proportions!

Today, more than ever, I’m sorting through and disposing of catalogs, brochures, credit card offers, and sales pitches on everything from replacement windows to service contracts for the fridge. It’s become a constant chore.

Then there are the telemarketers – the countless numbers of them that are somehow exempt from the “do not call list”, either because they are only “doing surveys” or because you inadvertently gave them permission to call you. This permission may have been given when you gave your phone number during a purchase, or perhaps opened a bank account, bought a car, entered a drawing at a local shopping mall, or on any number of other occasions you offered your personal information to a company that’s affliated with the company the telemarketer is representing. Ay yi yi!!!

And how about the nuisance of deleting email spam? Whether it’s for vitamins, “enhancement” potions, or maybe just forwards from well-intentioned friends (who felt compelled to send along that chain letter so that you might escape 10 years of bad luck!), it’s time-consuming to have to sift through it all.

But what annoys me most is the relatively recent chore of shredding! This is a new job. Who was shredding 10 years ago? Big corporations perhaps? Certainly not Mr. & Mrs. Average Citizen. Today we’re warned that all hell could break loose if we casually discard papers that are financial/personal for we could be “tempting” identity thieves! Some of the things that you’re advised to shred, like credit card offers, often arrive as junk mail!!! Talk about a vicious circle of lather, rinse, repeat.

Honestly, if you totaled the minutes wasted with all of this nonsense, you could probably paint a bedroom, knit an afghan, read a book . . . maybe even WRITE a book!

It’s frustrating. I’ve done all of the usual things – getting on the do not call list, removing our name from mailing lists, and not giving our email address and phone number out willy-nilly. Unfortunately doing those things only seems to lessen the problem, not totally eliminate it.

What do you do to tame the junk mail, telemarketing, spam-sending, paper-shredding tiger? 😉

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