About 95% of the faxes that come into our office are from PITA (Pain In The Ass) people we’ve never heard of using our ink and paper to try to sell us something dubious. Like these guys:

Most of them use a lot more ink than this. That makes me crazy because changing the ink cartridge is a pain in the butt, especially if it involves a run to Office Max and standing in one of their interminable lines.
Whoever sent this fax didn’t bother identifying the source company by name and address (wow, talk about inducing trust!) but did provide a URL to unsubscribe. It’s www.NationalDoNotFaxList.com and it’s almost certainly bogus but I went there anyway and became, according to the site, the 13,774th person to unsubscribe.
We get a lot of PITA telemarketing calls at home, mostly from banks and credit card companies whose customers we are (so they can call us at will) and from charities. Some of the numbers are masked in Caller ID with fake numbers (there’s one that says it’s 012-345-6789), Private Caller or Unidentified Caller. I answer them all anyway and just say “Thanks but we never do business over the phone with someone we don’t know. Please send something in the mail.”
“What’s your address?”
“Very funny. Goodbye.”
When I lived in New York, ordering Chinese meant that a delivery guy would drop the food off, then zoom down the stairs, stopping at each floor to slide menus under apartment doors. One night doorman had a great idea. He collected the menus from complaining residents and made a list of the restaurants. When a delivery guy showed up, the doorman checked his restaurant’s name and if it was on the list, the resident had to come down to the lobby to get the food. This had a deleterious effect on the offending restaurant’s business so they promised to be good. And they were, for a week or two.
PITAs like these give direct marketers a bad name, like John Edwards did for lawyers when he channeled dead babies.