The Rants of Issachar

On thursday I received my third piece of fax spam from Tryten Technologies, (formerly Tryten Solutions) at work. I used to work for Tryten so I take this a little personally.

Tryten is a small company, (less than a half dozen employees when I worked there), and it was a very nice place to work in some ways. Tony Janzen was a very good boss. For instance he gave me the day off as a paid sick day to attend my friends father's funeral on very short notice.

On the other hand, Tryten used and continues to use unethical practices to promote the business, namely fax spam. As intrusive as advertising is, fax spam is worse because it actually shifts the bulk of the cost of advertising to the person receiving the it.

The advertisement itself is also deliberately deceptive. All three faxes (received months apart) have had the handwritten phrase "Attn: Mike Here's the info R" written across the top. The thing is that there's never been anyone by the name of Mike working at MRCS and the handwriting is identical on every fax. I believe it's intended to make a deliberate piece of unsolicited advertising look like it was intended for another fax number and you are simply the lucky recipient of some useful information.

There is a note on the bottom of the ad giving instructions on how to be removed from the "promotion list". This is a sham. You will not be removed from the promotion list, or if you are, you get added back later. Making no effort to maintain your opt-out list is as bad as not having one. Since I knew Tony personally I actually contacted him the first time I got the fax and explained that Tryten's products were not useful to the school and we didn't want any more faxes. He told me that I'd be removed from the list. I ignored the second one I received sometime after. The third prompted this post.

Fax spam is an unethical way to drive a business. It apparently works, but that doesn't make it right. It's based on harrassing large numbers of people and charging them against their will for the privilege of receiving advertising they don't want in the first place. The fact that a minority welcome ads like this does not make it okay to do this.

I will not buy from a company that sends unsolicited faxes and I encourage others to withhold their business as well. If you're reading this Tony I'm sorry if this hurts you. You were a good boss. But what you're doing is wrong.


Update: June 6th - 9:03PM

Well this actually generated more activity than I expected. As of right now, this page is the third site, (but the fourth hit), on a simple google search for "Tryten". (Out of 54,900 hits). I'm surprised I'm that high on the list, but who are mere mortals to question the ways of google... :P

At any rate, that got a comment below from "anonymous" who later sent me an e-mail going into more detail. I won't post that here. If he wants to, it's up to him.

One thing that he mentioned though was the subject of ethics in blogging and how that related to Jesus' teaching in Mathew 18 concerning correcting a fellow believer. That did occur to me when I posted it, but I wasn't sure how to proceed then, and I'm still not. Firstly, I cannot point to anything in the Bible that says "don't send fax-spam", (for obvious reasons). The reasons I think fax-spam is unethical basically boil down to general principals. I also don't want to be legalistic about this, but rather deal with the general principal that Christ was talking about. Having said that, how could I apply Christ's teaching in this situation? Tony and I aren't part of the same church community, nor do we actually have any continuing relationship. So how do I approach this? Should I have sent an e-mail to Tony saying that he needed to stop fax spamming and if he defended the practice then posted my comment? Wouldn't that seem like revenge in that case? How does step 2 work if we aren't part of the same church community? Should I send an e-mail now?

So... what does anyone else think?


Update: June 6th - 9:52PM

I should mention why I don't remove posts. It's because blog postings are a record of what I've said. (Past tense). When I change them, I'm retroactively changing the record of what I wrote. I will take responsibility for my words. I will correct myself or apologize when appropriate, but removing posts is different. That's changing the past.

Posted by:  kris

we get those ALL the time at work!
some of them we don't mind (one's from local restaurants advertising their weekly specials) but most of them are just annoying. I'm with you on this one.

Posted by:  Anonymous

I'm a friend of Tony's and have nothing but admiration for the guy. He's super-busy and probably just hasn't had time to follow-through on your request. In my experience, he thinks deeply about the issues of Christian ethics as they relate to the way he operates his business. I hope that this posting about his company disappears soon.

Posted by:  Sarah

Wow "anonymous", I do believe that you just issued a threat! I don't think you do Tony's reputation as a businessman any good at all by saying such things.
Tell us, how do Christian ethics justify unsolicited fax spam at the cost of the receiver?

Posted by:  issachar

Don't worry Sarah, I don't feel like I've been threatened.

As for removing this post, I don't remove my posts. I don't even change them except to fix spelling mistakes & grammar. I make updates, but that's it.

The faxes came months apart and there's been a total of three, so "hasn't had time to follow-through" doesn't fit.

I thought about it quite a bit before I posted that because I know Tony. This wasn't some anonymous faceless person. I like Tony and I don't want to hurt him. How do I speak the truth without causing hurt? I'm not sure if I can in this situation. The truth is sometimes painful.

I will say again that he was a good boss. I'm not saying that to sound nice or anything, it's just true. I know that Tony thinks about how Christian ethics relate to his business, and this is an area where I think he's made a mistake.

I believe that fax spamming is wrong. Like e-mail spam it's based on harrassing large numbers of people and shifting the costs of that harrassment to them in order to make sales from a small group. This may be the way the world works, but it's not the way it should work. We need to live the way it should be or nothing will change.

I really hope Tryten stops doing business this way. I hope that Tryten succeeds ethically.

Posted by:  issachar

oh, and to be clear... Not only do I not feel threatened, I don't think that was the intent. But thanks for being so quick to defend me though Sarah.

Posted by:  Sarah

Who said I was defending you dear? Its not that I thought you couldn't handle the heat or whatever. But I read it as a veiled threat, and probably since I am currently the victim of netstalking (don't even get me started), I make it my duty to expose such things. I have low tolerance for such stupidity.

Posted by:  issachar

Update posted above...