BarTalk February 2004
Volume 16, Number 1

Office edition

By Tony Wilson

I’ve discovered the modern day version of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. They all waste our time, annoy the hell out of us and combined with reality television and the National Enquirer, more or less signal the collapse of Western Civilization as we know it. They are, in no particular order: (1) Telemarketers; (2) Junk Mail purveyors; (3) Spammers; and (4) Purported Nigerian Civil Servants with free millions to give you. Here’s a log of my successes and failures with these time bandits, and, thanks in part to Andy Rooney, how I’ve learned to deal with them.

Junk Mail. It’s a pariah, isn’t it? But it does serve as useful fuel to start the fireplace on a cold day, or as colorful wrapping for fish. Those of us without fish or fireplaces can save the “postage prepaid” envelopes that come with our bills and send their junk mail right back to them. Return Visa’s “Wristwatch Blood Pressure Monitor” ads and Mastercard’s Toronto restaurant coupons at their expense! After all, it’s theirs anyway. And if Visa gets our junk mail flyers or American Express gets our sweepstakes invitations, perhaps someone will get the idea that if we wanted their sales pitch, we’d ask for it. But until then, they can pay to send it to us, pay to get it back, and pay to get rid of it!

Telemarketers. Instead of asking telemarketers for their home phone numbers so that I can disturb them when they’re eating dinner, I ask them to hold on “ just for a second…”, then I set the receiver down on the counter and resume eating my dinner (they always phone at dinner, don’t they?) until Telus’ telltale “beep, beep, beep” signals that the dreaded telemarketer has given up. I’m careful of calls where there’s no one at the other end of the line. It’s a telemarketing technique where a machine makes the call and notes the time of day when a live person is home to answer. It’s so a “real” telemarketer can call back when he knows a living body is there. In these circumstances, I start hitting my # button seven or eight times to confuse the auto-dialer, making it think it’s dialed a coke machine or my toaster, thus kicking my number from their system.

Spam. I’ll admit it. I thought I could beat spam. I actually sent a spammer a response. Thanks to the wonders of “cut and paste,” my response said the word “Spam”…. oh, about five thousand times. I warned them to stop or I’d taunt them again. My wife told me it was a silly idea, and it was. I now get 15 spam messages a day from digital cable hucksters, Viagra racketeers, penile enlargement surgeons, drug dealers selling Phentermine and, if you can believe it, spammers selling anti-spam software. These spammers are as relentless and as numerous as Tolkien’s Orks. They run rings around my anti-spam filter by quoting poetry in the subject line, using a “$” instead of an “S,” and adopting harmless names like Shawna Hall instead of 44hqomx@yahoo.com. Apparently you can report spam activity to a “spam cop,” which reports the spammer to the domain, but after my failed brush with revenge, I am at a loss as to what to do. I may get doubly spammed. New anti-spam laws and an award of $5.4 million U.S. against a “bulk faxer” gives me comfort that their doom may be imminent. May the fleas of a thousand camels infest their armpits. Better yet, I wish them and their domains many viruses in the new year.

Alleged Nigerian Civil Servants. Is it safe to say that nobody in their right mind believes that an ex-civil servant in Nigeria is prepared to pay me $300,000 for my bank account number for a week so that he can get $1,000,000 out of the country safely? How does a Nigerian civil servant earn $1,000,000, when the Canadian Prime Minister receives around $150,000 per year? Sure they’re all scams, but don’t they know that we know they’re all scams? Tell you what. As part of my research, I think I’ll reply to one of these and play it out to the bitter end just to see what happens. At best, I’ll make $300,000. At worst, maybe I’ll have an address to forward the junk mail and the spam to.

I’ll let you know.

Tony Wilson is a Franchise and Intellectual property lawyer at Cawkell Brodie, and has written for the Globe and Mail, the Vancouver Sun and Macleans magazine. His e-mail address is twilson@cawkell.com.

This article originally appeared in the February 2004 issue of BarTalk and is reproduced here with permission of both the author and the Canadian Bar Association, British Columbia Branch.