No junk mail

Distributing leaflets door-to-door is time-consuming but necessary if we want to attract an audience for a concert in our village.

It’s a task I undertake on a pretty regular basis, and I’m always rather shocked by the hostile notices that people put on their doors in an effort to fend off “junk mail”.

After all, whether the “junk” is coming from an impoverished local charity (as with our concerts), or from a major supermarket promoting its special offers, or from a local trader, it’s always distributed on a targeted basis and, compared with TV or press ads, is expensive on a per capita basis, both in terms of time and money.

So why is it that home-delivered mail arouses such hostility? In some way, it seems to me that people feel violated by it, but not by all the other ads that come into their lives and homes more indiscriminately on a continuous basis.

The lure of the dredger

When I was in the advertising business, travelling around the world a lot, I used to get irritated by the fact that everyone on aeroplanes seems to have opinions on the morality and otherwise of the business, mostly very similar. (Are people still so allergic to adverts arriving through their mail boxes?)

So in an endeavour to stem the flow, when asked on flights “What do you do?”, I tried to come up with an answer that would put a dead stop to the conversation.

For a while I was in marine insurance. This did quite well. Then, mid-way between Brisbane and Sydney one day, I was asked the usual question by a bloke and came up with the winning formula. I was in dredging.

A long look of puzzlement followed. But words failed him.