Dr Kronos and his ramblings

Here’s another choice unsubscribe message. Again, I assume this is just really lazy boiler plate, but if I get a message confirming my unsubscribe request I will post how long it took to arrive.

Your request to not receive promotional emails about your subscription has been received and will be processed within the next 10 working days.

If you change your mind at any time, and want to continue to be told about changes to your service, and receive customer offers, simply reply to this email with the word “resubscribe” in the subject line.
In the meantime, if there’s anything we can help with, please do contact us at help@ft.com or on + 44 (0) 20 7775 6248 (from Europe and Asia Pacific) or 1-800 628 8088 (from elsewhere).

Kind regards

FT.com
Customer Service

I’ve now been reading a number of personal development websites for awhile. Recently I started to put into effect some of the ideas I have picked up from these sites. One quite important idea is clearing out email clutter. Mailing list emails are the perfect place to start.

My experience of legitmate company mailing lists are either a) extremely easy to unsubscribe b) require some minimal involvement taking just a few minutes c) require me to log in to now forgotten accounts and d) Ciscos unsubscribe method.

Here is a screen shot of the web page I received today on trying to unsubscribe from Cisco

Cisco unsubscribe message

What I really love is not the fact that it can take 5 days to remove me from the unsubscribe list, it is that it will take up to 5 working days. What, the server running the mailing list refuses to work on weekends ?

Seriously Cisco, what confidence is this meant to instill in me if you can’t even get a simple mailing list removal to happen instantly ?

Update – I received an email about an hour later saying I was unsubscribed. Still, less than impressive.

Check out this eBay item for sale. Sorry if the link is dead when you read this, it might have been sold by the time you check it out. In that case check out the wikipedia page for it.

I feel that the twitter experiment is coming to an end for me. It’s not the fault of the twitter technology itself; It is the general concept that has ended up losing me. I already suffer from information overload with RSS and web comics, but with twitter I found what I was getting was general information that was pretty fleeting at best.

So it appears I will be uninstalling tweetdeck (which in and of itself was a very good program) and saying sayonara to my twitter account.

May next step may well be to start managing those other information overloaders, email and RSS.

Bred at first, as many physical diseases are, in the wickedness of men, and then disseminated in their ignorance, these epidemics, after a period, get communicated to many sufferers who are neither ignorant nor wicked.

Charles Dickens – Little Dorrit, Book Two, Chapter XIII

Economic crisis, swine flu pandemic (OK, H1N1 Influenza A), seems a perfect quote for any of these man made problems.