There’s fundraising, and there’s fume-raising. I’ve done some fundraising in my day for causes I believe in. Fume-raising is fundraising that results mostly in making people fume. Here’s an example a friend just emailed me about:

Lee: I haven’t been in the best of moods anyway, but I just had a phone call that has me boiling.

Every week there are calls asking for money for this and that and the other.  This one was from a guy who first tells me that a dozen firefighters have died in the past year protecting me, and then asking for assistance in order to provide better training for firefighters, so that less will die next year.  I don’t know if this guy is representing something legit or simply a con artist boiler room, but either way, to use the recent death of firefighters in [Souther Carolina] as a lever on my wallet…[expletives deleted].

I held my temper, interrupted him and told him I do not make pledges in response to phone calls, and that I found his pitch offensive.  That I did not blame him, as someone else probably wrote it and has him calling and pitching it, but that he should tell his bosses how offensive I found it, and then I hung up.

I don’t know the “cause” in question, but I greatly doubt any donation would be going directly to the families of the firefighters who died in South Carolina. And  so I join you in your outrage.

I also get outraged by the mysterious phone solicitors who hassle my elderly mother at all hours of the day and night for donations. She was writing plenty of those checks until my sister secretly took her checkbook away.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 24th, 2007 at 5:44 pm and is filed under Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.