Junk phone calls that hit another nerve

Back in the dim and distant past - which I admit to being old enough to remember - junk mail plagued my doormat every day when the morning post arrived, no doubt much to the chagrin of my postman, for whom all of these unwanted items of correspondence added even more of a burden to his already bulging mailbag.

This junk mail would endeavor to whet my appetite for all sorts of useless things I either didn't want or didn't need, or quite honestly couldn't care less about. For example, the good people at Reader's Digest would tell me the thrilling news that I had been entered into a draw, for "stunning prizes". The only catch being that I would have to shell out a small fortune to buy a set of encyclopedias or "great works of literature" which I quite frankly had no wish to obtain. And if I had wanted to buy such volumes to decorate my bookshelf, I would have purchased them from a more well-known and authoritative publishing house.

Fortunately, I could just tip all of this unwanted paper, mostly unread, straight into the rubbish bin, and in this way it would at least serve some useful purpose by keeping my local neighborhood refuse collectors in useful employment, and perhaps the paper could be recycled to serve some more socially useful purpose, such as toilet paper.