Modern pests

[rhialto]

I have been plagued by unwanted advertising materials that are put in my physical mailbox. This started sometime earlier this year. This despite that I have the appropriate sticker on my mailbox telling the world that "NO I don't want unaddressed advertising, and NO I don't want door-to-door newspapers." The delivery people are supposed to take notice and skip my box.
So I started finding out what the procedures are in a case like this. It turns out you have to complain to either the sender or the distributor of the advertising with a complaint, they have to analyse how it could happen that the delivery person made this mistake, and reply within 4 weeks. Then, if I am not satisfied with the reply, of if there is none at all, I have 4 more weeks to complain to the central advertising oversight committee.
It seems advertisers have this strange repulsion against letting me know who they are. Yes, they may tell me the address of their shops, but they don't like to tell you about their headquarters, or their fax numbers, or things like that. Sometimes there is a small printed notice such as "If you have complaints about the delivery, please call [some number]". And it turned out that it was not just one or two distributors that were a problem here: I contacted, one way or another, at least five.
So that is very strange. Why would 5 distributors all at about the same time decide to ignore the NO/NO stickers? A possible solution presented itself when one sunday evening, someone rang my doorbell and I had a chat with one of the distribution girls. She assured me that she was always very precise in observing the stickers, and that it was definitely not her who was doing it (even though she acknowledged that I received some stuff she is delivering). One thing she could tell me though was that she had had an argument with one of my neighbours who told her not to deliver advertising, but who didn't have a sticker. He thought it was normal for her to just remember the fact, just for him. And she saw him dumping his share of junk mail into my mailbox.
The next time I got junk mail, I dumped it back in said neighbour's mailbox with a note written on it to the effect that he should keep his waste to himself. It was better, for a while, after that. Maybe he dumped his unwanted advertising in other people's boxes now. But the problem reappeared. This week I got two more unwanted deliveries. On wednesday I phoned about the first of those, and today a friendly lady phoned me back, to check if they could have the junk mail I received this week, to see if they could find out from which delivery person it would have come. She also mentioned presumably the same delivery girl, who she praised as very reliable, and I thought I could agree with that.
In a further action against the junk mail I stuck a note on my mailbox this afternoon, mentioning that I didn't even want advertising from neighbours, and that they should get a NO-sticker themselves. When I returned home later, the note had mysteriously disappeared... that looks like there is really someone who felt addressed by that, don't you think? I'm going to put up a note again, attached more thoroughly this time.

Comments

[helensaysping.livejournal.com]

Bah at neighbours (irritating ones anyway).