I have the misfortune to own two cell-phones, a Telkom line, two e-mail addresses, a TV and a radio. The odds are that at any given moment I will switch on the TV or the radio and I have a better than 70% chance of hearing or seeing an unwanted advertisement selling me something for which I have absolutely no use and even less desire.
One of my cell-phone numbers is known to quite a few people and I make a point of never going anywhere without the wretched thing. When I was trying to park the car in the stygian gloom of one of those endless underground parking garages in Cape Town last week the phone rang twice and each time it was in an attempt to sell me something.
The first call was an SMS telling me why I should immediately change to MTN (I'm on Vodacom and always have been), and the second was one of those really annoying "Call me" messages, adding the rider that if I did so I would learn most interesting things about a funeral policy.
My second cell-phone has a totally unknown number and exists only for use in emergencies when I have a) forgotten to charge the first phone, b) lost the first phone, c) left the first phone at someone else's house, or d) when my Telkom phone is out of order, which is not a totally unusual occurrence. This phone is always switched on and lives on its charger in the infrequently used second sitting room of the house; every day I check the thing just to make sure that it still works and is still on charge and every day there are at least two missed calls and three messages. One wonders where these calls come from since no-one knows of this phone's existence. A fair example would be as follows: the most calls are as a result of indigenous peoples with too large fingers who are unable to dial the right number; the second culprit (although this is really part of the first) is the dreaded "call me" service that some evil genius devised as a means of robbing us of what little privacy we have left. I never return "call me" calls and only return calls where the number is known to me; masked numbers go straight to the bin. The third most frequent culprit is the awful SMS (short for Short Message Service, but it's never short any more); I have to read this in order to delete it and always find that someone is trying to sell me something somehow somewhere. Delete.
One would expect a degree of privacy from the Telkom phone, but even this number, although it is ex-directory, is prone to unfortunate young women who call at supper time and start reading from a PSP (Planned Sales Presentation) without pausing for breath long enough for me to say "No thank you". So I simply cut the connection. If you phone me during business hours or if you are trying to conduct a bit of market research I may be more amenable. But not always.
My first e-mail address is the one I regularly use and is known to a large number of people; despite my service provider having installed software which quite efficiently bars unwanted messages, I still get about two messages each week offering me a larger penis (usually in appalling English, but then they often come from foreign countries), the last message was headed "Transaction Error", so I though it was from one of my banks and opened the mail. WRONG. It also offered me a larger penis. How do these people even know I'm male, and of course it follows that if I were female they should then be offering me a smaller vagina. I also quite frequently receive messages which are quite indecipherable because they are in no language that I recognise.
My second e-mail address is only used for people with whom I really don't want to interact; nevertheless, I open it up once a week just to see what's there. Surprise, surprise, apart from the usual spam messages offering me cheap drugs (Viagra and so-on), at least 70% of these messages come from Nigeria and other African countries to the north and are addressed to me in horrendous English asking for my help in liquidating some massive amount of money that a distant relative has left unclaimed after being killed in an air disaster which never happened. The remainder always tell me that I have selected the lucky sequence of numbers in an American/Australian/whatever lottery and have won a really mind-boggling sum; now when I selected these numbers I have no idea because I have never even heard of the lottery in which they purport to have been drawn; however, I am urged to reply to the mail as soon as possible quoting all sorts of numbers. As long as I don't have to send my banking details over the air I suppose it's OK, but it wastes a great deal of time.
In the evenings I like to watch the news and, once in a while when there is something decent on the TV, I become a couch potato. However, I prefer to tape these programmes because then I can fast forward to get rid of the endless advertising with which I am constantly assaulted. Once upon a time there was a normal channel and a commercial channel and it was really very NQOCD (Not Quite Our Class Darling) to watch the latter; adverts were not for us elevated mortals. Now all the channels are commercial, and I believe that companies pay a great deal of money for their few seconds of airtime. None-the-less we are exhorted to "Pay your TV licence; it"s the Right Thing to Do'.
Why? Aren't the advertisers paying enough?
One wonders how the human race survived in the dark days before TV, cell-phones, the Internet; of course, there were adverts in trains and there were hoardings alongside the tracks; there were placards on station platforms, and prophets of doom at street corners. Whatever happened to the peace and quiet that those almost forgotten people enjoyed as they went about their daily routines?
No wonder we have become a race of hypochondriacs living on Prozac; anyone would under the circumstances.
