Columnist Susan Snyder: This ‘spam’ is hard to digest

Tuesday, Oct. 16, 2001 | 8:26 a.m.

Susan Snyder's column appears Tuesdays, Sundays and Fridays. Reach her at snyder@lasvegassun.com or 259-4082.

I almost miss the human contact of telemarketer calls.

Almost.

It's not so much the endearing way they call right when I'm trying to saute chicken with one hand and dump pasta into boiling water with the other while the cat winds around my ankles hoping said chicken will fall to the floor.

It's the game. Answer or don't answer. Answer and see who hesitates longest before someone speaks. Answer and mess with them.

The guy hawking MCI long distance service had a ready response for every reason I had for wanting to keep AT&T -- except one.

"I have AT&T because they have never called me at dinner hour," I said.

"Oh," he replied.

Back in the 1970s, I once overheard my mother take a call from someone selling cemetery plots. Mom had just returned home from the hospital after having some surgery.

"I just got out of the hospital. What do you know that I don't know?!" she asked the caller, who I can only assume was horrified.

But telemarketers now rarely have human voices, and they rarely use telephones. Most marketing now comes via e-mail -- "spam" as it's called in the language we've invented to go with our computers. (We've given up on trying to use the one we already have correctly.)

There's no one to argue with. There's no one to play with. There is only paragraph after paragraph of blather clogging my in-box.

"Guaranteed $5,000 line of gold credit with 0 percent interest!"

"Risk-free profits in betting!"

"Earn $2,000 a week stuffing envelopes at home!"

"Live anywhere you want and use the Internet to earn an income that can support you!" Probably by sending junk e-mail to thousands of other unsuspecting souls.

It wouldn't be so bad ... OK, so maybe it would ... if the information in the subject line had anything at all to do with the message. One of the 10 pieces of electronic dreck waiting for me Monday morning was a message apparently sent to me from me titled "Internet made easy."

It was actually an offer telling me how to borrow money so I'd be debt-free. (But if you borrow money, you're not ... oh, nevermind.)

"Reduce your pain."

I don't have one.

"Refinance your mortgage."

I don't have one.

"Increase the size of your ..."

I don't have one.

But I receive five or six messages a week offering various options for changing its dimensions. Now, that's a topic a telemarketer is not likely to raise at dinner time.

Most spam has a way in which people can remove themselves from the list. But we shouldn't have to go to the trouble, according to the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email, or CAUCE.

We shouldn't have to remove ourselves from lists we never asked to be on, the advocacy group says. And some reply addresses are fakes. The "remove" mail comes back as undeliverable.

There's no sport in that.

And simply hitting "delete" is like hanging up on the telemarketer before he's read his 180-word refinancing pitch without punctuation or pause.

"Wow, that's a great deal!" you say. "But I don't live here. I just stopped by to water the plants."