My mother taught me that it is rude to interrupt. It is something that my wife and I, like most parents, try to instil into our daughters. With all that happens in the modern household it is hard enough to find time to have a conversation of more than 30 seconds without those precious sentences being spliced by a question about lost underwear.
Yet as we teach our children to wait their turn, they increasingly bear witness to a band of beings who have no compunction about interrupting whenever and wherever. Telemarketers, hawkers, hucksters, canvassers, chuggers – call them what you will. People who ring, knock or accost us on street corners in the hope of selling us something or raising money. This human spam is everywhere and, like its email equivalent, becoming ever more endemic.
As the financial crisis bites, this situation only worsens as businesses and charities alike become increasingly desperate to prise a few of our remaining dollars from our hands.
Each human spammer, of course, thinks that they are the only one. Each of them only wants a ‘few moments of our time’. Most of them are young, many of them are groovy, a lot of them are students who just need the money. Almost all of them know very little about the organisation they are representing other than what’s in the script.
The strategy of these serial interrupters is always the same. They approach enthusiastically, with a smile that says ‘why wouldn’t you want to talk to a friendly person like me?’. They, usually, cut to the point fairly quickly. Deep down they know their prey wants to move on, so they make it as easy as possible for us to take the bait.
They never, ever, want you to think. Thought is the human spammer’s kryptonite: the unwritten expectation is that if you have to think about it, you won’t act. Which is probably right. So they have no brochures, website addresses or phone numbers. They have a million reasons why you should sign up right now. And they assure us that a get-out clause exists somewhere deep within the wall-to-wall carpet of small print on the forms they proffer.
I, for one, have had enough of this. I already donate to charities and already have electricity. I don’t need any more. So I’ve signed up to the Australian government’s Do Not Call register; that has helped to abate the flow of telephone interruptions. I’ve now put a sign on the front door of our house advising canvassers to try elsewhere; I’m hoping the canvassers know who they are. And in future I will be ignoring all street-bound human spam by making no eye contact and fending them off.
It is annoying that it has had to get to this. But being interrupted is annoying too. Perhaps, if we all start doing as I am doing, they will eventually go away.
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I've been work- ing in business, one way or another, for the last 20 years, and writing for the last ten. My main interest now is to get messages across - yours and mine - in a readable and approachable fashion. 
