I love to watch the screen fill up with emails. The quiet morning air abuzz with possibilities: friends or colleagues answering a question I posed, sharing a joke, making a date, or re-discovering me, after many years, on Facebook.
Lately, though, the emails that fill my inbox are from strangers. Nigerian bankers, people with funny sounding names wanting "to be my friend", Harry and David, West Elm, Pottery Barn, anyone and everyone I've ever had the brief pleasure of sharing my credit card with, no matter how casual and brief the interlude. I don't know these people, I don't want to know these people, and yet they are here, knocking on my internet door before I've brushed my teeth or drank my morning tea.
Junk email is nothing new but since the recession I've noticed a huge increase in volume. Stores introduce new sales, and even newer sales, HOURLY. Scam artists demand my attention and my money DAILY. On-line media promoters and marketers solicit me WEEKLY. It's so desperate, so distracting, it's the internet equivalent of drunk-dialing.
I have squandered so much of my valuable energy and time deleting this vast wasteland of correspondence from my computer and then doing it all over again on my iPhone that today, I decided to put an end to the nonsense. I decided to take control.
I unsubscribed to ALL the merchants.
I marked as junk ALL the people who claim I'm about to become a millionaire.
I wrote to ALL the promoters and said thanks but no thanks.
I took my life back.
And I will keep taking my life back until all the unwanted strangers are gone and I can open up my email in the morning and SMILE once again.
Take that internet.
Don't mess with a busy mom.
*photo courtesy of google images
5 Comments:
I hear you! I've tried the "unsubscribe" route and most still couldn't catch the hint. I ended up having to classify them all as SPAM , which is an easier folder to clear.
I've recently been working on doing that too. They make it such a pain in the ass to unsubscribe to those things though--you can spend hours on the computer! Here's to cleaner inboxes, though!
Well done! Let me know if it works.
Have you ever watched what happens when you give money to PBS/NPR? Ugh.
You have inspired me to get off my *ss and do the very same thing - I am inundated with crap that I do not want or need to be bothered with!
Funny you saying that about the recession and the increase in spam - JJill and LandsEnd are making me crazy with the emails, and that's got to be why.
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