Wednesday, July 16, 2008

Charities Suck

OK, that's a terrible thing to say and I don't really mean it, but GOD they can be annoying.

About 12 or 13 years ago I joined PBS. We lived in Chicago at the time and I joined with a largish donation that entitled me to a Jacques Pepin book. I mean I love the programming (Jacques, Dr. Who, Monty Python, etc) and I felt good about contributing to make the programming possible. I was very happy to contribute and I would have happily renewed my membership year after year, occasionally taking advantage of interesting offers and making larger donations.

But then they started to call and ask for money. Mind you, when I first signed up they asked me if it was OK for them to call me and I said, "No." Every time they called I asked them to remove me from their call list. After a while I started asking for supervisors. Nothing helped. It will be a cold day in hell before I ever give my contact information to a PBS station again.

They can have my money, but they absolutely can NOT have my digits.

What reminded me of this? Yet another friggin' message from the Red Cross about another blood drive that I can't possibly go to. I have donated gallons of blood over the years and I am happy to do it when I can, but I seriously do not want their stupid machine to talk to my machine twice a week about a blood drive happening in the middle of the work day close to home, but 35 miles from where I work. It will be a cold day in hell before I ever give my contact information to the Red Cross again.

The only difference is that I have long since learned never to answer my phone. If you call my home phone I absolutely guarantee that you will not talk to me.

Just because charities have legal immunity from ignoring Do Not Call registries, does not mean that there are no consequences for seriously pissing people off - how can they possibly not understand this?

And yes, all of my numbers are on every possible Do Not Call registry.

David

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