Spam, It's Not Just For Breakfast Anymore

Spam is one of those great breakfast or lunch meats from my youth in Hawaii. It is one of the most consumed canned meat products in the state of Hawaii. In fact, it is consumed three times as much in Hawaii as it is in the rest of the continental United States combined. But that's not the kind of spam I'm going to talk about in today's post.

The real focus of today's story is all of the electronic and postal spam that infiltrates our lives. I spend a majority of my time opening unsolicited targeted postal mail, and subsequently shredding it to avoid identity theft. In addition to that, my e-mail boxes are overflowing with advertisements that I would never ordinarily even think to look at. Even the attempts of the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 have not slowed the marketers down one bit. Today's marketers have even gotten around some of the unsolicited messaging by slamming their unwitting customers with extra mail, postal and electronic, by burying it in terms of service, or by simply creating marketing messages in subscription e-mail. They got cute and coined the term bacn.

I do have a keen eye for business and marketing, but I think our society has gone a bit overboard with all of the different types of mail and messaging. It takes me hours upon hours per week to get through all of the mail and messages. Marketers are getting a bit more clever these days. You can't tell if a message is an actual bill, a letter from a loved one, or a piece of junk mail. Even by attempts to remove yourself from catalog mailing lists through various services, there is still a significant amount of paper and electronic waste that remains.

I recently went on vacation, and came back to a mountain of junk mail and tens of thousands of spam messages. I'm just a normal guy, so I can imagine what kind of mail you would get if you actually asked for some of this stuff. So, whenever you see me attempting to clean the office, you know what I'm actually doing. I'm trying to get rid of all the paper and junk mail and respond to the important stuff.

I now have a craving for some breakfast. I think I could use some spam and eggs about now. See ya.