small Vindication

This morning I got a junk fax from Travel company with a very fancy website, whose name starts with M and has the phone number: 1-877-810-7899. I HATE Junk Mail, so I wrote them the following:

My Office received a fax publicizing your services. We are a government office and are not interested in such advertisements.

Further, this fax did not have a sender number, and seemed designed to appear as if it were a personal communication including an article in the Vancouver Sun, by a staff writer not listed with that organization. This is deceitful and unnecessary – If I had read of your current (as the article indicates) 40% discounts in a magazine advertisement, this would have been quite enough to get me to look at the company for my upcoming vacation. However, I am repelled by your form of advertisement and will not look to m- Travel anymore, and am forwarding this “article” to the Vancouver Sun copyright department.

Please remove us (613.xxx.xxxx) from your mailing list unless in response to a communication from one of our officers. Personally, I would recommend that you recognize the negative image created by this disregard for the environmental waste caused by mass, unsolicited mailings, and start exploring new ways to serve [and not annoy] your [potential] clients.

I felt very grumpy after writing it, because I feel grumpy after telling people off, even when I'm fairly certain I'm in the right. Anyway, I felt slightly better when I received this reply from the Sun:

Hello Valerie
Thanks for sending us this information - we became aware of this fake article late last week, but we didn't know it had made its way to Ontario!

We are hoping that the grammatical error in the headline and the poorly written article will tip people off to the fact that we had nothing to do with the "article". Our lawyers are trying to get the travel company to cease and desist faxing this out.

Thanks again for bringing this to our attention!

News Research Librarian
Pacific Newspaper Group Library

I'm disappointed that she doesn't say "we're suing their A%% 's off" but really, as long as they don't do it again, I don't actually need vengeance. (and this will be practice believing that!)