I don’t know about you, but I am inundated by people and organizations that want to help me:

• Advertisers want to help me treat illnesses I didn’t even know I had (and don’t – I checked)…

• Sites where I have shopped on-line want to help me find that next pair of shorts, or shoes, or grass clippers…

• Organizations want to help me “heal the world” and “fight the good fight”…

• One on-line used book retailer is so desperate to help me remember to find that next book that they follow me everywhere! Now that’s dedication!

Now, there’s nothing wrong with trying to sell a product if you’re in business to, well, sell products. But sending more than one email a week is just plain ridiculous. What’s going on?

The Goings On

I blame it on the changes that have occurred which have us now living off of shorter and shorter sentences, quick blurbs, and almost nonexistent paragraphs (note the design of this particular article).

And I blame it on the design of cell phones which have to cram everything into a tiny screen that requires one-finger scrolling. Personally, I don’t use one. I need to see a much larger screen so I can continue to exercise my eyes and glance up to a wall once in a while to practice telescoping my vision just to keep the eye muscles active. Oh, oh… I’ve started a long paragraph… excuse me while I minimize again!

Attention Industry

And for goodness sake, don’t forget “we’re here for you. To prove it, just in case you missed our email/text 5 minutes ago, we’ll send another – a reminder of sorts – oh, heck – maybe we’ll send an actual new email with different content. We can be generous.”

And since everything is written once, fed into an automated system that targets whatever “subscriber” list is being used based on “your interests” or some other equally inane excuse for contact (called an algorithm)… rant, rant, rant!

It’s all about capturing and imprisoning the attention of the person behind the phone (or occasional laptop). That’s how everything runs now… it started with TV and it has moved on like a giant whale and sucked us all in. We’re like plankton in the ocean – individuals don’t matter but tonnage sure does!

Drop-In Advertising

And finally, remember those illnesses I didn’t know I had? It appears there are tons of things I didn’t know I needed… that’s why my free email program uses my inbox as a dartboard and throws me one-liner email insertions – over, and over and over again. They get paid by all sorts of people to do this! So happy to know that even senders who don’t know they’re emailing me are keeping in touch. Who knows? I might actually respond to one of them someday just to discover what all the excitement is about!

Shared Contact Lists

And lest we forget we are simply one name on a list of thousands (sorted by topic, interest, income level, age, sex, yadda yadda), you should know that you, yes YOU too can own a list – just fork over the bucks and we’ll send you the one you want! Then you can scam, cheat and harass your way into becoming a zillionaire, just like the big guys.

Wrap-Up

Okay, so I’m done now. I have to go so I can spend about an hour deleting emails that showed up while I was writing this message.

If you didn’t read this, I understand. I won’t know, of course, because I haven’t imbedded anything to trigger a counter or some-such verification, and you won’t know I understand because you won’t know I wrote this to you!

Have a great day!!!

The Sitdown Comic