GROIC Day 9

Tonight I needed to clean out my Scout bag, which had accumulated various bits and pieces, many of which were candidates for disposal. I’d hoped for 9 piles of stuff, but there was actually less rubbish than I thought, although still more than 9 individual pieces. I resolved my too much/too little dilemma by sticking with the piles of stuff idea, but scrounging around amongst some other piles of semi-sorted stuff to see if I had anything else ready to part my company. I ended up with my required 9 piles, each of which were characterised by type of content or source.

One of the piles contained three charity begging letters, which had all arrived within a day or two of each other, and all with the same kind of gift intended to make you feel that you should send them money to contribute to the charity by “paying” for the nice unsolicited gift. There were several things that irritated me about this: the use of guilt/emotional blackmail, the expense of sending me something instead of using the charity’s money for charitable work, and the fact that these three charities were all using the same company to send me the same kind of thing all at the same time. So, I’m not just getting rid of this stuff, I am sending it all back with a waffly note telling them why they have annoyed me to the point that I’m not even going to consider donating to them. Well, when I say “I am sending it all back”, I confess I kept the personalised address labels they sent, since these are clearly of no use to anyone else (even if they are symbolic of the waste of money that so irked me).

There was a nice bonus for the day, however, that came about as I scavenged for extra piles: I found a $30 iTunes gift card that I’d forgotten I had!

Tomorrow I hope to be ridding myself of a fairly sizable and embarrassingly long-standing collection of clutter, but I haven’t yet decided if I’m going to count it tomorrow or some other day.