The dark side of junk mail

Are you as bugged by all the useless paper in your life as I am? On Sunday I spent a few hours shredding paper from the last six months. Not all of it was junk mail. Some of it is was statements from my bank and from my mutual funds. There were also quite a few credit card offers despite the fact that I have opted out. Unsolicited credit card offers seem very irresponsible to me in the current climate of identity theft. A few years ago I started packing all the other offers into the return postage paid envelopes and mailing them back to the credit card companies. That gave me a little satisfaction for a while but, like all other paper management, it's time consuming to make sure that your little paper bomb is not traceable (meaning you need to make sure none of the offers you are sending back have your name on them!).

I have tried in vain to get my mutual funds people and my bank to stop mailing me statements. These two are really the worst offenders. I have put in requests with the mutual fund office here in Austin as well as all the corporate headquarters, going so far as to set up logins on their websites so I can check my statements online but the mail just keeps on coming. My bank is also pretty bad. On the website they offer paperless statements. I sign up for that but a couple of months later, it seems to reset and I start getting my paper statements again.

And while I am on the subject of useless paper, I also don't understand why I keep getting so many new yellow page phone books on my doorstep. I don't use them and it's pretty difficult to recycle them since (I think) you aren't supposed to put them out with curbside recycling. I haven't looked up a phone number in a book in years. I get all that info on the internet now. There seem to be more and more companies who make phone books. You should see the tower of books on top of my fridge, not to mention the ones that have fallen off and are now lodged between the side of the fridge and the wall.

There's lots of other useless paper like the the newspaper-y looking coupon circulars, etc. but I guess the bright side of the issue is that I am lucky to live in a city with so many options for recycling from curbside to Ecology Action downtown. At least I've got that!