Here’s something that happened this week that really pissed me off. I was going to blog about it at the time, but I was so annoyed that anything I would have written about it would have been laced with profanity. Which is how I usually talk anyway, but I’m sure that not everyone who stops by here wants to read an expletive every second word. Now I’m cooled off enough to just wonder “why?” about the whole thing. Anyway.

M’s father died a couple of months ago, and M has been renting out the house since the end of last year. The new tenants moved in, and everything was fine. A couple of weeks ago, one of the tenants rang up and said that there was some mail for M that had been delivered there, and wanted an address so they could forward it to us.

So last Tuesday we got the forwarded mail from the new tenants. I had a glance at it, and apart from a couple of things for M’s dad, there were three envelopes, each addressed to “The Relatives of the Late *M’s dad*”. I asked M if I could open one, and he said yes. So I opened one of them, and started reading. The letter started out with how sorry they were to write to us during such a difficult time, but they heard that M’s dad died and thought that we might like to give them some money for a memorial. Huh? All the letters were worded very similarly - they all knew his full name, and where the funeral had been held, and wanted us to fork over some money during our “time of grief”. What the fuck? Any spam is annoying, but really - this kind of spamming just seems a bit crass to me.

So I went from zero to pissed-right-the-hell-off in a matter of seconds. First, how did they get the details? Do they spend their time scouring the funeral notices in the papers to see who has died and where their funeral is being held? Or do they have a deal with the funeral directors where they buy the details of the deceased? I understand that selling memorials is a business like any other, but I think it’s extremely inappropriate for them to advertise by sending out letters containing specific details which they’d obviously had to look up. Funeral directors have advertisements on television - why can’t they? You don’t receive letters from funeral places saying that they’ve noticed that Joe Bloggs has just celebrated his 95th birthday, and since he’s 20 years older than today’s male life expectancy, does he want to think about arranging his funeral?

Do they have deals with hospitals as well, sending out letters to people who have miraculously survived some operation or illness, to see if they want to buy a prepaid memorial, so that in the event of complications, their relatives will have the peace of mind of knowing that they will have the tribute that they deserve?

I think that any spam which has been specifically addressed to you and contains any personal details that you haven’t given them to be a gross invasion of privacy, but surely the line should be drawn somewhere. Obviously there’s no such thing as spamming etiquette.