posted 2007/05/29 at 16:12
It's been over five months now since I graduated from the University of Toledo, and you know, you wouldn't know it from the flood of junk mail I continue to get. Right after I started attending UT, I started getting a whole lot of junk mail on a regular basis that I wasn't getting before, mostly from Chase Bank and Disney. I won't say how I know that I'm getting this mail because of my enrollment at UT, but I will say that this junk mail shares a certain identifying factor with most of the correspondence I received from UT over the years, a factor that just reminds me all the more of the difficulties I faced as a student (and an employee) there.
I had held out some naïve hope that this mail would at least go down slightly in volume once I had graduated, but that hasn't been the case. I'm still getting all the same offers I had been getting before, leaving me with a huge pile of junk mail accumulating on one of my bookshelves which I occasionally whittle down while watching something on television. (I personally fine-cut all the identifying information out of those pieces of junk mail, then shred that information finer than any electric shredder would before pitching it out in a separate bag of garbage from what I use for the main pieces of mail.) If anything, things are now getting worse because there's this one student loan consolidation company that keeps sending me all these pieces of mail trying to get me to consolidate my loans with them, and apart from the sheer volume of it all, the fact that they keep trying to disguise their junk mail as official correspondence from my lenders is really starting to annoy me.
This alone would be bad enough, but in addition to sending me all this junk mail, the same company is also sending me at least two or three e-mails a week, none of which get blocked by my spam filters for some reason, plus I usually get at least one call a week on my cell phone from them. I don't know the exact laws on what constitutes harassment, but I'm pretty sure that this company has mastered the fine line between legitimate marketing and harassment. I'd contact them and ask them to knock it the hell out, but as with spammers and stuff I'm just worried that if I do contact them, they'll actually get worse about that sort of stuff, or sell my information out there to other companies. You know, I'm glad that UT was able to provide me with my education at such a low cost, but I have to wonder just whether or not it was actually worth it to save a few bucks per year at the cost of all this headache later on.
copyright © 2008 Sean Shannon