Twitter

Follow me on Twitter: @janemcintyre12

JanePic

Hello.

I'm Jane McIntyre, a voiceover and writer, formerly an award-winning BBC radio newsreader and producer. My blog covers life, love and loss; travel, coffee and chocolate; with some heartfelt pieces in the mix about my late dad, who had dementia. Just a click away, I'm half of the team behind www.thetimeofourlives.net - two empty nesters who whizzed round the world in 57 days.

Monday 15 October 2012

Stop, oh yeah, wait a minute Mr Postman...



....bill, leaflet,leaflet,flyer, bill.

Is that IT?

Today`s post.

It arrived at 1.30 pm, and contained only demands for cash...and a clutch of junk mail. The postman didn`t even ring twice. (There`s no doorbell, to be fair...)

Anyway, I`d been meaning to register with the Mailing Preference Service (MPS) for ages. It`s the organisation which says it can stop you getting junk mail .We get way too much. And it goes, (all of it...) unread, into the recycling bin. Pointless.

So I attempted to register online. Maybe you`ve tried it. You can add the names of up to five people who live at your place. I got to the fourth, and tried to move to the next page. It told me I`d added something that wasn`t `a valid name`. 

Really? Frustrated, I had another bash. I *even* tried to spell my daughter`s name the `French` way. Rien. Maybe it was the Mc in McIntyre baffling the system? That Celtic mix of upper and lower case, all in one surname? Nope. Wouldn`t let me proceed. I know: maybe the confusion of more than one surname daring to live under one roof? I had no witnesses; no cake, no ring, no junk mail shredded into confetti...but I did the decent thing, and married myself off. Still nothing. Our names were `not valid`.

Irritated; I called the `helpline` number listed on the website. I got through to a lady robot, who suggested that I punch in the names of family members, using my telephone keypad. Fiddly. No thanks. I`ll follow the website`s intoxicating promise of talking to `a live agent`.   


Meekly, I joined the queue. No irritating music either. BUT HANG ON....!!! They then repeat the automated message about all their `consumer executives` being busy, again and again and again. Yep, I could have put the phone down. But I just had to see what happened. The message happened. Twenty more times, in quick succession. Then...guess what? The nice lady said `goodbye`...and disconnected my call.

Oh dear, MPS. As a key customer organisation set up to help people reduce the amount of junk mail they get every day...and the amount of waste that family then has to recycle...sorry...but today? You were  rubbish.

 "Goodbye" :)


ps, Maybe you`ve had more luck? I`d love to hear how you got on...or how you manage your own junkmail!

1 comment:

  1. Woke up at 4am thinking of the day ahead, I only do 2 days for C.. sake. too awake to sleep, don't want to read Running with the Kenyans, Found your blog... now your tweets make sense. my multimedia platform is too low, my O2, in a poor reception area, Blackberry doesn't give me enough info, the link to "does she take Sugar" takes too long and I am in the dark.
    Caller preference is just as bad as MPS, apparently they are both only good for calls or mailings originating in the marches, I think both are scams to collect your preferences, the number of surnames in a house, how long you are willing to put up with a telephone queue - the really difficult data to collect- they then flog it to Tesco who can target their offers.
    Perhaps it’s time to go back to bed. Question do you read comments on historical blogs? Is this a rhetorical question? And will I ever know?

    ReplyDelete