Sometimes it pays to have to pay for something

Today my inbox had about 35 spam emails in it. That may not sound like a lot but this is after we added the cox.net spam filtering service to our email. Before then it ran 150 or so a day.

Anyway this got me thinking about unwanted communications and how it relates to the financial cost of communicationg.

On my first visit to the US way back in 1982 I remember reading through the terms and conditions, in my hotel room, printed in the local phone book. Let's not go into why I was reading the phone book . I remember being surprised that the residential plans involved a flat fee and unlimited calls. By contrast, the plans offered by Telecom Australia at the time were a fixed fee plus so many cents per local call (and still are so far as I know). At the time and for many years afterward my thinking was that the Australian model was rather expensive by comparison with the US model.

Fast forward to 2002. I've now married a US citizen and migrated to the US. On my second day in the country the phone rang and I answered. A recorded message ran something like this: 'This is so and so. Please hold the line until one of our operators is available'. So and so was a well known telemarketing company (and the only reason I'm using the phrase so and so is because I can't remember who the so and so's were!). I was outraged! These bastards ring me and they want me to wait for THEM? I hung up immediately.

In the following months I think I must have fielded a couple of thousand such calls (I was unemployed for quite a while). Fortunately, the Do Not Call list does seem to work - the number of calls has dropped dramatically since the DNC list kicked in. I might add that I entered our number in the DNC list when it was announced.

Contrast that with my experience in Australia where you pay so many cents per local call. Back there almost the only unsolicited marketing calls you get are from the phone companies because they're the only ones who get essentially free calls. Every other marketing organisation has to justify the price of each call. I'm not sure on the commercial rates; the only price I know is 22 cents per untimed local call from a residential phone. But even assuming commercial discounts down to, say, 10 cents per call, it wouldn't take long for a company to rack up a large phone bill.

The analogy with email spam should be obvious.