I had to stop myself from shouting “Amen” and “Halleluiah” during this rant by Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH):

The $700 billion bailout of American financial institutions is likely to be rubber stamped this week. I can’t say that I’m particularly happy about it, but at least this morning’s television news wasn’t as polluted as usual with bankers crying out for Uncle Sam to rescue them. It’s been reported that matters became so pathetic […]

As sent to me by Robin Yassin-Kassab: Now here’s a bail out plan that works! I’m against the $85,000,000,000.00 bailout of AIG. Instead, I’m in favor of giving $85,000,000,000 to America in a “We Deserve It Dividend”. To make the math simple, let’s assume there are 200,000,000 bonafide U.S. Citizens 18+. Our population is about […]

My blockade of cold call sales people took yet another unexpected turn; the Project Manager in my team, who hitherto has kept her name out of the the bullseye of these firms, is now starting to receive much of the same email traffic that I receive. The first paragraphs in their latest email is revealing: […]

The absurdity of cold call selling has reached new depths at my workplace; my voicemail is full of messages from recruitment agents who are desperate to get in touch with me.  Still, I’ve kept the barriers up. So, they’ve gravitated towards my Development Manager. He too has put them off. So finally, they found out the […]

I am fairly glad that the end of the week is nigh, and that the following Monday is a holiday in the United Kingdom. It has been a depressing five days, and the in-built languor of summer’s end was heightened by a conversation I had with my boss on Wednesday. Company confidences forbid me from […]

I decided to give myself a vacation from all the cold sales calls I’ve been receiving. The way I did it was simple, I forwarded all my calls to voicemail: the people I really want to hear from have my mobile number anyway. Unintentionally, this has become a fascinating experiment in how far people will […]

While it’s not generally possible in a business context to do too many nasty things to cold call sales people, the same rules do not apply when one is out of the office. Fortunately, in Britain, there is a Telephone Preference Service which is supposed to act as a barrier to unwanted marketing calls; this […]

One of the most irritating aspects of my job is that I receive many speculative sales calls. I’m more unfortunate than most in this regard: a director who has since left the company gave away my name and direct phone number, and this information has been seized upon by unscrupulous firms like a school of […]

Much of the recent hullabaloo about the “credit crunch” and “sub prime crisis” is emotionally satisfying. The stockbrokers, hedge fund managers, and other grey pinstripe suit hucksters with six figure gas guzzlers who got us into this mess have a healthy air of panic about them and a salubrious paranoia born out of wondering when […]