Friday, June 20, 2008

And Now For Something Completely Different: Save The Earth Instead of Working On Your Book

Tired of throwing away bags of unused, unopened catalogues every week? Tired of wondering when the unending cycle of wasted paper will bring us to our knees as a culture? Tired of getting mail addressed to "Mr. Potter," just because you ordered a men's shirt from Eddie Bauer six years ago? Tired of working on your book????

I was.

Have you asked yourself, "What can I do to stop this horrible waste of our earth's resources? Should I even carry them back to my recycling pile, or should I leave a bag permanently by the front door so I can just walk them out the curb on trash day? Should I make an appointment for transgender surgery so that my sex and my catalogue salutation will be the same? Does anyone really buy electric nose hair clippers, and would they be useful in a department meeting? Should I break my manuscript up into three or four articles, return the books to the library, wipe my hard drive and throw the rest of the damn thing away?"

I have thought such things.

Then I discovered: Catalogue Choice!

Yes, you have catalogue choice. You can log on, set up an account, and day by day, as these useless catalogues come in the door, you can take them up to your study and instead of having sad thoughts about landfills and your scholarship, you can log in every hour or so and have Catalogue Choice expunge your address from a merchant's files. For free.

Offer not valid in Canada, Ukraine, North Korea or Myanmar. Cookies may be deposited on your computer to subscribe you to another set of catalogues altogether. Offer not valid for graduate students desperate to finish the dissertation before taking a job September 1.

5 comments:

Sharon said...

In the UK we have a splendid thing called the Mailing Preference Service. No more junk mail (except the stuff for past occupants, and when you forgot to tick the 'no junk please' box buying something online). I thought I'd seen a US version of it... but perhaps that was Canada.

Tenured Radical said...

So easy to confuse the US and Canada: furs drying on the fence, national health....

Actually we can do that on the internet too, but your address is sold by the most amazing people: your university, Public Radio, your employer, professional associations. Once the American Historical Association sold all our addresses to someone who turned out to be a shill for a Holocaust denier group. They apologized.

TR

PickyHistorian said...

Excellent information -- thank you!

The Evil Typo Fairy, however, gets us all ... your link is missing two letters: tps://www.catalogchoice.org/dashboard

:)

Susan said...

I signed up with Catalog Choice last fall, and I can say it works. . . no more catalogs I don't want.

THere's one mailing list -- I think it comes from some very virtuous magazine like the Progressive -- at some point got the wrong letter as the start of my last name. So I get lots of left wing junk mail from progressive causes and mags for a misspelling. It makes it MUCH easier to throw it out!

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