Don’t Believe Salesmen, Or, Their Talk

Two things happened today which disillusioned me irreparably about the profession I had been working in all along. Marketing. I was a copywriter for corporate in their corporate communication departments, which was, sort of, food on the table, and kept the home fires burning. I confess I wrote pretty gooey stuff for these companies that exploited my talent. But, all said and done, no regrets. At least, no major ones, that is, till today.

Today a friend thrust a medicine in my hand saying it was good for me, apparently, for my health condition. He is an marketing executive with a pharmaceutical company and I very trustingly gave him the cost of the medicine. I swallowed (wrote “ate” here, sorry) one of his pills and towards afternoon my body was itching and my hands had swollen up with welts as a result constant scratching. The friend had pulled a fast one and I was a sucker for his sales talk. Next time we meet I will wring his neck for the welts, and force feed him his own medicine. (I look at my welted hands as I type this.)

The second one is a trial software I installed. The goddamned thing doesn't have a functionality to remove it from my computer. Every day it sends messages to me to buy it for USD 19 only, per month. Am I mad? USD 19 per month is a royal amount considering I am not working anymore and whatever I scrape from the bottom is not sufficient enough. And, there are no retirement benefits to boot. (A clerk in a government department - a distant relation - draws a pension of Rs 18,000, which is a shame. They have been parasites and will remain so.) Imagine my state: no money; no software. Then I go to the directory where the programme is installed and try to delete it from there, from the root, sort of. It says I need special permission to do that. In fact, the company wants to s**** my happiness till I buy its software. Ahem!

Both the above are instances of aggressive marketing. Face it, we are living in an age of marketing with no care for the consumer, or, what his experience is. The digital age is all about selling and not servicing the customer. So, beware, don’t tell me I didn’t warn you.

Meanwhile, any help on how to remove the software?