Mind Moves: Is anyone irritated? Is anyone really annoyed with the wasted time and energy expended daily deleting unwanted e-mails, disposing of uninvited junk through the letterbox or "opting out" of direct-marketing harassment?
This latest pestering is particularly irritating. Why should people have to put in writing their desire NOT to receive information they never requested? Why should they have to "opt out" of something they never opted into in the first place?
Why? Because as legislation on data protection tries to control the avalanche of advertising abuse inflicted upon ordinary citizens, those who make money by exploiting the contact details of their clients (or should that read the information they provide to associate organisations?) try to find ways around it.
How do they do this? They ask you to opt out. Of course, offering you the option to "opt out" is the ideal way to ensnare you, because in this hurried, busy, information-overloaded world, the chances are you won't find the time to do so. And if you don't opt out, you opt in.
The literature implies that there is a time limit to your choice to be or not to be a recipient of all the "latest information about products". Unless you register your desire not to receive the information you never requested by a specified date, then you will continue to be sent it.
However, if you have the time to read further into the brochure (and who has time for this?), it emerges that you can opt out at any time by writing to the address provided. This is because it is your legal right, so that information must be hidden somewhere in the blurb, among the other bumf you don't have time to read, telling you how to do what you don't have time to do and should not have to do in the first place, in this rather insane society we call consumerist.
Furthermore, if you try to opt out, you may find, as an experiment in responding to a typical example of these data protection notices revealed, that the freephone number doesn't work and there is no addressed envelope among the literature with which to make a written reply.
Nor, in this instance, was any e-mail option offered by which to register one's choice. Would it be paranoid to suggest that e-mail would provide immediate written proof that one does not want to hear from them?
OF COURSE EVEN IF freephone numbers do not work, there is usually an alternative pay number that you can ring. You will undoubtedly be asked to hold, while options for company "products" are conveyed numerically, so that you play a concerto of digital digits until you reach the crescendo of a human voice, a customer server, nay a "server of valued customers", who "checks the system" and informs you that yes, indeed, "the system is temporarily down".
Now when did a phone become a "system", and a broken phone something "temporarily down"?
Temporarily down is exactly how the "valued customer" feels after any foray into the "smarmspeak" of marketing. For who has not heard the slick salesman cajole a young couple who have just purchased a couch into buying rather expensive, unnecessary insurance for it, even though the product should have its own warranty and their house insurance covers the unforeseen?
Who has not retched emotionally at the manner in which a genuine complaint is met with a litany of stock solicitous phrases, none of which simply includes "I'm sorry"?
Who has not listened to the glib gibberish delivered by the unethical to the uninformed that intimidates them into acquiescing to the unacceptable when they have been deprived of their rights? Who is fed up with being called a "valued customer" while simultaneously being demeaned?
This is not a trivial issue, this irritability of customers confronted by the profanity of consumerism at its most intrusive. This is a health issue. It is a genuine stress on an already "overloaded system", to borrow the parlance of postmodernity. Stress arises when people feel incapable of coping with the demands made upon them.
There are health hazards in having to protect oneself constantly from direct marketing hits. This new spate of stress, caused by syntax and small print that attempts to circumvent data protection legislation by befuddling the overburdened, is yet another example of stealth stress. It is wrong. Don't call us, we'll call you, should surely be a consumer's right.
As people become the targets of more and more missiles from the marketing world - mobile text ads, blackberry bombardment, e-mail intrusion, 24-hour-a-day contactability and the rather persistent insistence that the customer must do all the work and pay for the privilege - they become weary of life itself.
Long before the "tiger economy" there was a Dominican nun in Dublin renowned for her warning to generations of school children that "the Devil goes around like a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour".
They laughed. They didn't know she was prophetic.
• Marie Murray is director of psychology at St Vincent's Hospital, Fairview, Dublin.