Thursday, August 02, 2007

Short Subjects

I've lost patience with all the "Yellow Page" advertisers. This week I've been in the office, so I get two or three calls a day from them. I'm now hanging up on them, because I've had it with people from India calling to "verify my information".

They're wasting my time, for one. The whole thing is a racket, for another. If it's legal for all these bogus companies to pose as the "Yellow Pages" and send out bogus invoices for listings never ordered, it shouldn't be. As a green new business owner I got taken by one of their scams. I got what looked like an invoice for a yellow page ad, which I thought was for the ad I took out in the local telephone directory. So I paid it. A few weeks later I found out I paid the wrong company.

I tried to get a refund, but couldn't even get anybody to take a call or respond to my email. It would have been too difficult and time-consuming to badger them for my money back, which would never have been probable anyway, so I gave up and chalked it up to experience. I think that's the whole idea of these rogue companies to rip off small businesses that haven't caught on to their game.

It wasn't my local "Yellow Pages", but some other rip-off company touting some other directory called "Yellow Pages" that had nothing to do with the local phone company. I was scammed. These days I don't bother to buy any listing in any Yellow Page directory, not even the local book. It doesn't bring me business anyway, so there is no point.

The car lot on the corner has this on their sign:

Beware of becoming too open-minded; your brains might fall out.

Exactly.

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