7 Reasons

Tag: Chuggers

  • 7 Reasons That Chugging Doesn’t Work On Me

    7 Reasons That Chugging Doesn’t Work On Me

    Chugging: I hate it.  Being chugged is a loathsome experience and I can’t help thinking ill of chuggers either.  And their chuggery-pokery just doesn’t work on me.  Here’s why.

    1.  It’s Always Me.  Anyone who claims that they are always targeted by chuggers might come across as somewhat paranoid or persecutional. But, the fact is, that I am always targeted by chuggers.  Literally, every last damned one of them will see me coming and try to stop me on the street.  Other people seem to be able to walk along the street unmolested.  My wife, for example, rarely gets stopped, but I can’t walk down a busy shopping street without having to fight off swarms (no idea what the collective noun for chuggers is.  A horde?  A phalanx?  A menace?) of them.  Do I have a kind face?  Do I look gullible?  Do I look like Danny Wallace?  No, none of those things (well perhaps the second) but, despite this, Saturday afternoon shopping for me is like running the gauntlet, but with fewer Romans, and more laminated id cards on lanyards.

    2.  Time.  The assumption that my time isn’t important is infuriating.  They’re trying to steal my time.  And I like time.  I don’t have enough of it already, so I’m very protective of the time that I have.  If I’m wandering around town with some friends looking relaxed and happy, then that’s because it’s time I’ve set aside for wandering around town with my friends looking relaxed and happy.  It’s not an indicator that my time would be better spent talking to a chugger about cancer for ten minutes before we both agree that it’s probably a bad thing and I give them all my money via direct debit over the next five years.  Nor is it an indicator that I’m not doing anything important.  I am. The assumption that I’ve nothing better to do than talk (or, as they prefer; listen, nod and agree) with someone I don’t know about a cause that they’re interested in is just arrogant.

    3.  The Guilt-Trip.  A woman signing people up to an environmental charity once said to me, as I rushed past her on the way to meet my wife for lunch, “Don’t you care about the environment?”.  This was brilliant.  I could reply “no”, and appear to be a borderline sociopath who cared not one whit about something fundamental to human existence, or I could reply “yes”, and leave myself open to her pitch.  Because that’s what she wanted.  She wanted use my innate sense of social responsibility and congenital niceness to trap me into a dialogue with her.  I had to think on my feet. “Don’t you care about my wife?”, I replied.  This worked.  She just gazed at me, perplexed, which allowed me to continue my journey*.  But why should I be made to feel guilty just because my agenda is different and I don’t want to stop and sign up to her cause?

    4.  Politeness.  I’m a well-brought-up young man.  And chugging attempts to ruthlessly exploit that to deprive me of time and money.  I was raised to be nice to people.  To stop and listen to them when they are talking to me and certainly not to ignore someone and walk away when they’re addressing me.  But chugging forces me to do that.  This makes me feel like a bad person.  Not as bad as Hitler, obviously, but not as good as I would like to think I am, which is sort of a happy medium between Mother Theresa and the Pope.  And by a happy medium, I don’t mean Derek Ocorah, he seems like a right misery.  I hate having to interrupt people in order to go about my business.  It makes me feel awful.

    5.  Passion.  There’s no doubt that many chuggers are passionate about the causes they are trying to sign people up to.  But that doesn’t mean that I’m passionate about that cause.  And that doesn’t make me a bad person.  If I don’t want to sign up to a lifetime of Red Cross junk mail, email or any other form of spam that doesn’t mean that I don’t care about medicine or disaster relief.  What it does mean is that perhaps my money and time (both of which are finite resources) go to other – equally worthy – causes that I prefer.  What I shouldn’t have to do is justify that decision to a stranger every time I go into town to buy some light bulbs or a new wok.**

    6.  It’s Cynical.  Chuggers are earning money to sign people up to their causes.  They’re not being paid commission, this is a myth.  But no one would get paid a wage if they weren’t effectively raising money for the causes that they represent.  So while they’re attempting to make me feel guilty for not signing up to (which they tend not to recognise is a wholly different thing to not caring about) their causes, they’re profiting from the transaction.  Their attempts to sign me up aren’t wholly altruistic yet they’re represented as being so.  It causes me to wonder whether they genuinely believe in what they’re trying to sign me up to, or whether they’re cynically attempting to exploit me to hit a performance target.

    7.  It Taints My View Of The Charity.  In fact, it makes me think uncharitable thoughts about charitable causes.  I love Amnesty International, I think it’s a brilliant organisation, but will they be getting any money from me?  No.  Because I’m the sort of person who won’t support organisations whose practices I disagree with.  I’m not saying I definitely would have donated money to AI had they not attempted to sign me up twelve times one Wednesday afternoon (which, ironically, may be an infringement of my human rights), but I certainly won’t be doing so now.  I won’t be signing up to any morally reprehensible pro-oppression organisations to spite Amnesty though, that would be taking things too far, and the WI seem to be getting on fine without my help, but Amnesty have insured that they won’t be getting any of my money.  Their chugging has been counter-productive.

    *I could have substituted any phrase for “my wife” as long as I’d answered the question with a question.  It’s foolproof.  “The Gruffalo”, “Mathematical Biology”, “my underpants”,”The Moon”,”Cheryl Cole”. All of those would have worked equally well and would have allowed me to make my escape.  Try it yourself.

    **Which is not very often, I don’t go through an abnormal amount of woks.  I go through a regular amount of woks.

  • 7 Reasons to Embrace Junk Mail

    7 Reasons to Embrace Junk Mail

    Junk mail.  No one likes it, but there are valid reasons to embrace it.  We don’t mean give it a cuddle, that would be weird; we mean accept and enjoy it, because there are – fortunately for us – almost seven reasons to.

    Junk Mail (Image courtesy of Stop Junk Mail)
    Junk Mail (Image courtesy of Stop Junk Mail)*

    1.  Wanted. There is something very comforting about the sound of your letter box opening and something dropping onto the floor. It makes you feel wanted and loved. If it’s a bill then it’s good to know British Gas care that you are still alive and if it’s junk mail – probably from the local estate agent asking you if you would like to consider selling your house to a family of five who have just moved to the area – well it’s good to know that they think you are friendly. You know, the kind of person who would consider moving for a family of five. The estate agents wouldn’t put the same letter through Lord Sugar’s letter box would they? No. Because he has evil in his eyes. And a guard dog.

    2.  New Experiences. One of the most regular pieces of junk mail that adorns house mats all over the country are those from local (and not so local) take-away restaurants. Whether it’s Indian, Chinese, Taiwanese, Bangladeshi, Italian or Chav, what a great way to start experiencing a different culture. It might only take you one chicken dansak to decide that you want to go and experience India for itself or it might only take one late pizza delivery by a teenager who calls you ‘boss’ to make you decide you are living in the wrong part of town.

    3.  Pens.  They say that you can never have too many pens.  And fortunately, charities have challenged this age-old assumption by providing them to us free of charge to us via the medium of junk mail.  And it turns out that you can have too many pens.  I write stuff every day, in fact you’re reading it now.  I write far more than the average person and rarely use a pen.  I require one pen, for the purpose of writing down random notes that I can’t read later on and eventually turn into paper aeroplanes.  Fortunately though, there is an alternate use for all of the pens that charities send to me at a loss.  I use them as legs for my four-legged (and six-legged) potato animals.  I clearly have too many pens.  And potatoes.

    4.  Rubbish. To be embraced heavily are those charity bags that get stuck in your letter box. You know, those that the charities ask you to fill with old and unwanted clothes. Well, if you do manage to remove them from the letter box without ripping them, they make brilliant bin bags. Don’t go walking down the street swinging one around in the breeze though, you’ll become a prime chugger target.  You’ll get chugged.  In a chugging.

    5.  Baldness.  We don’t know everything about the 7 Reasons readership.  The 7 Reasons team both have hair, and we imagine that our readers do too.  But there may be some who are afflicted with baldness.  And, if there should be such people reading, they might learn from this use of junk-mail.  Because back – way back – in history, in a time almost lost to human memory there was once a thing, a sort of a big flaming ball of heat and light that dwelt in the sky.  Some cultures worshipped it, some feared it, and it had many names.  Here, it was known as the sun.  And, in those far-gone days, when it lit up the sky, it was a menace to the follicularly challenged who lacked the natural protection from its rays that the rest of us take for granted.  But with junk-mail there’s always a free emergency hat lying on their doormat, waiting to be origamied.  Just in case the great orb in the sky should ever reappear, as unlikely as that seems.

    6.  Love. If this isn’t enough to satisfy your junk mail habit, then the final option is to create a junk mail-mache person. Then you can really embrace it if you are that way inclined. Or a pervert as it is more commonly known. Just make sure they are dry first.*

    7.  Lifestyle.  As a guide to living, junk mail is invaluable.  Want to know what not to eat or drink?  All of that information is conveniently posted unsolicited through your letterbox.  Whether it’s takeaways, highly dubious drinks delivery services, or the offers at your local branch of Londis.  If a picture of something (these things are always pictorial) comes through your letterbox, then it’s disgusting and common and bad for you.  Yet surprisingly tempting when drunk; which is how they get you, by the way.  They expect you to read them when you’re lying face-down on your own doormat having just made it home from a big night out; when your guard is down.  Why else would they put them there?  Bastards.

    *Because wet perverts are the worst kind.

    You can also use it to make one of these!

    *If you can’t find the love to embrace junk mail, check out Stop Junk Mail here.

  • 7 Reasons You Know Spring Has Arrived

    7 Reasons You Know Spring Has Arrived

    Spring Sunshine

    1.  Cheery People. As soon as the sun comes out people start smiling and being happy. It’s so annoying. At least it seemed to be for the cashier in WH Smith yesterday. All I said was ‘Good Morning’ and she looked at me as if I’d just molested her cat. (Not that I know what that look is. Obviously).

    2.  Chuggers. Or to give them their more politically correct name, tossers. Okay that maybe a bit harsh, but there are bloody millions of them now the sky is blue. It’s hard not to feel resentment towards them when you have to get past what seems like the gauntlet from Gladiators everytime you want to get to the tube station.

    3.  Legs. They are beginning to protrude from shorts. I am not the biggest fan of men’s legs – you’ll probably find a whole other sex who prefer them more than I do – but it is the men who get them out first. It’s that musty aroma you can smell.

    4.  Near Death Experiences. This may sound cruel, but I strongly oppose mobility scooters – when I am outside. When the sun is out, the brightness makes it much harder to read the cricket score on my phone. Therefore I am going to be concentrating more on getting the angle right than looking where I am going. Under such circumstances I have a habit of not walking in a straight line and so venturing into the path of a mobility scooter is not so much a possibility as a certainty.

    5.  Australians. Yes, they are arriving. In droves. They seem to disappear during the winter months – probably to hibernate – but now they are back. And why do none of them seem to work? All they do is sit outside the Walkabout, drink and watch me play dodgems with mobility scooters. What am I? A tourist attraction?

    6.  Builders. Not that it is particularly unusual to see builders, but it is unusual to see them working. Hopefully they’ll get a bit done before they have to stop again in June due to the dangers of sunstroke.

    7.  Smoke Alarms. This might sound strange, but the warmer it gets the more regular the sound of a smoke alarm. Usually mine. I would like to blame this on an electrical fault, but no one is going to believe that. It’s more to do with the fact that I put cheese-on-toast under the grill, head off to open the windows and accidentally become distracted in front of the mirror.