Tales from the Steppes

2006-02-23

2:45 p.m.
Thursday, February 23

Not to put too fine a point on it
Say I'm the only bee in your bonnet
Make a little birdhouse in your soul
- They Might Be Giants

On Tuesday, I got an interesting piece of junkmail. I actually opened it, which is fairly unusual to begin with. It was a product survey for a type of product that I do not buy - vaginal yeast cream. Maybe that is TMI but since the answer is a negative one, it seems a bit less questionable. So I was looking at this detailed survey, wondering how they pulled my name out of the hat, when I realized that I had actually bought a tube of the stuff at some point. It seems that the SU picked up a really bad case of foot fungus a number of years ago on a trip to Singapore. He went out for an early morning run and one leg went into an open sewer. Ever since then, he has not been able to permanently rid himself of this infection and apparently Vagisil, or whatever generic I picked up, beats it back a bit.

My usual reaction would be to instantly pitch anything like this in the trash can. However, there was a $2 bill stuck in with the survey as a thank you. So I had a dilemma. Not a big one, but still one that the senders of the survey were counting on. Was I going to be honest and fill the thing out and keep the $2 bill? Well, no. I had no intention of filling out the survey, even though it would amuse me to throw off their curve however minutely. But I did not feel like wasting my time, as it was 4(!) pages long. I am not sure that there is that much information to be gleaned but then, I am not in marketing for a reason.

I guess I could have sent the $2 bill back in the postage paid envelope but I feel there should be a bit of a penalty for bothering people with this sort of thing. If they were stupid enough to send the money to me and try to manipulate me into responding to their survey, losing the $2 should not be too unexpected. But what to do with the $2? I did not feel right about profiting from this but I had to do something with the money. So I put it in my pocket and figured something would come up. And it did. On my way out to do field work yesterday, I saw a homeless man standing in the falling snow, collecting money from the few drivers who even looked at him. So I gave the $2 bill to him and feel pretty good about it.

I guess this is a bit moral relativism here but I am OK with that shade of grey. Of course, the homeless man could have been scamming or just using the money for drugs or alcohol. Not my issue. I could have bought him a couple of cans of soup instead but I am just not that worried about it.