Sick of Spam & Sick Spammers

Nupur Upadhyay has invited me to Desktopdating. I don't know what Desktopdating is and for that matter who the heck is this female fiend, Nupur Upadhyay? It just gets worst - with strangers “Tagging” me, unsolicited mails offering me Viagra and similar sounding substitutes at a discount, mails informing me that my “application” for a loan has been processed or that I had won something in a contest that I swear I never took part in, a more recent trend of marriage portals of a particular community inviting me to join in the hunt, friends inviting me to join some obscure sites with names like “Jaxtr” and “Glitchcast” or the more notorious “Facebook” or “My Space” and the usual dose of pornographic link sites and penis enlargement offers – it has become quite a chore of putting my inbox through a sieve to look for meaningful mails.

The next level of nuisance is now on my mobile phone. In addition to the pesky tele-marketers, I now have spam messages promoting loans and redundant offers, most of them from my own service provider, Hutch, now called as Vodaphone. If changing my mobile number wasn't such a pain in the neck involving the tedious process of informing all my friends, relatives, superiors, relatives and countless other service providers like my bank, I would have given Hutch (Vodaphone) the boot long ago. A sizable chunk of the tele-marketing calls and most of the spam messages I receive come from Hutch. Not only do they pester their customers with unwanted offers, their network coverage must be one of the worst and most of my friends concur with me on this. Hutch probably has the most stupid people on the customer support (though I’ve never talked to the customer support staff of other mobile service providers). When the National Do Not Call registry or some such thing came about, I saw the report in the newspaper asking Hutch subscribers to send a message “DND” to “111”. I promptly did, only to receive a message back saying this service was not available presently. At about 2 a.m, I called up their customer service and got through to a male with an IQ of a dodo. I explained my predicament only to be reminded that I have to send the same darned message to the same darned number. I somehow managed to convince him that it was not working on my number and got an assurance that within 48 hours, the calls and messages would stop. Weeks later, I’m still waiting for redemption from this menace. Hutch (Vodaphone) still sends me messages promoting caller tunes and other services and the others still call me up and I have made myself a promise that Hutch (Vodaphone)will not have the pleasure of annoying me for long.