By Alex Allen
I know that money is tight at the moment, but is there really a necessity for the plethora of companies advertising on TV for us to send various things off to them in envelopes for money? The first example of this that registered on my radar was Envirofone, a website that will give you money for old mobile phones. What exactly are they doing with these phones? Because, come to think of it, I never actually bothered to ask. So fixated was I with the cheque for £11.72 that had come through the post that I hadn't even contemplated what they might be doing with my Sony Ericsson K700i. It's not that I particularly begrudge someone inheriting my collection of numbers for local takeaways and my high score for Bejewelled, it would just be nice to know. 'Send us your phone, it'll help the environment' advises the chav in the advert. Will it? How? That isn't a rhetorical question, I'm genuinely intrigued. Is someone else going to get my phone? Are they just going to strip it down and make vending machines out of it or what? Frankly I do wonder where the product I'm going to spend my £11.72 Argos voucher on will prove to be any less redundant to me in three weeks than the phone I've just relinquished. Or perhaps there is a website in the pipeline to deal with those, too. There are many websites such as this, Envirofone was just the first that came to mind, so perhaps their awful advertising campaign was the best of the bunch. Mazuma Mobile are another, at first I wondered whether Mazuma was a word at all. It is, it's actually a 19th Century Yiddish slang term for money. I'm sure that won't be lost at all on the sort of people sending their belongings in. I think I've just become more of a cynic, but I do wonder what the catch is. It seems like quite a generous offer when, to be honest, if someone came round and asked if they could have it I'd probably give it to them. It would be an odd request, and if you're reading this and thinking of coming round and trying your luck I'd request you don't.
Of course the thing about sending an old phone somewhere is that the object is generally worthless to the sender anyway. The service works because it's offering you money for something that up until then was just lying around. But the latest fad just baffles me completely, sending all your gold in an envelope for cash. So, to recap, they want you to send your most valuable possessions in an uninsured envelope, something they call a 'process pak' (unfortunately not a typo), to a processing plant where your gold will be looked at by a valuations team who will then pay you a fair price, or at least a price, before melting your jewellery. There just seems something intrinsically untrustworthy about this, as if their headquarters are set somewhere in Mordor and the gold is melted in Mount Doom to make swords and arrows for Oarks. Come to think of it Cash 4 Gold probably would have saved Froddo an awful lot of time, although even he would have baulked at sending the ring in an uninsured envelope by standard delivery. As a general rule, I refuse to trust any company that has anonymous testimonials as part of its literature. I feel compelled to tell these people that just because you write something in between quotation marks doesn't instantly make it credible, and writing that Joanna thinks that your service is fantastic means fuck all to the rest of us. I don't know who Joanna is, and to be honest, I'm surprised that someone who was apparently so financially fucked that she had to resort to mailing her belongings to a melting factory to get by could find the time or motivation to write about how pleasurable the experience was. If you're going to start making stuff up, how about 'of course having to melt my wedding ring to pay my electricity bill was a real bitch, but given the circumstances the company did what they said they going to do when they said they were going to do it'.
Don't like those, well why not just sell your entire house to some sort of shady phone line and rent it back from them again? How low can this ship sink, Bone Marrow 2 Go? The Insta-Child Adoption Line? I feel bad because these companies are preying on people who grew up and lived through and age where they felt they were entitled to a certain quality of life regardless of whether they could pay for it and are now realising the unpleasant truth that the bubble has burst, but it isn't as if there aren't alternatives to these sleazy phone companies and if you are really prepared to send all your stuff to someone you don't know with nothing but an envelope to protect it then you may as well put whatever little common sense you had in with it.
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