Free? But is it really?

This particular day I was feeling saucy, or brave, or something - because I went right past the page where they warn you about having to give up your personal info to get the free toy. Why did I do this? I don't know. Part of it was that I was going to create a brand new, never been used email address to try this out with. Part of it was the fact that I knew that if it worked out, then I'd have something I actually wanted from one of these so-called free offers. What the heck, right?

The deal with this offer, as with most, is that you have to give them your personal info, including the precious email address, then agree to x number of offers on the following pages - in this case, two offers on each of the following five pages. I agreed to get calls about vitamins, weight loss products, free vacations - you name it, I'd happily take the call (at work, of course - where I have caller ID and can send them right to my VM) and try to reap the rewards.

And everything was fine. Until... I got to page five. Where I could select offers to subject myself to, but I couldn't actually submit the form - so I couldn't sign up for the offers, and more importantly, I couldn't get to the page where I can claim my free network camera. The whole reason I had subjected myself to this whole ordeal.

After several efforts to somehow trick the website into either giving me a submit form or just get something to happen - including re-loading the page - I gave up. I noticed that mere minutes after signing up for the first of the offers I had already started to receive the deluge of emails - not surprising, really - but this didn't change the fact that I was getting all of the drek with none of the rewards.

Since I didn't really see trying to dig up the company responsible for the site, nor did I have the energy to start reading through the spam I'd received so far. What to do? I was going to delete the new account, but I decided to leave it for the time being and sleep on the matter.

The next day, still irritated about the process, I decided to leave the email open. I'd wait a month (in this case, just a little bit longer than a month) and see what happened with the email address. I also made the decision that when the calls came in - and I knew that they would - then I would let them know that I wouldn't be able to talk with them about their products and why.

Sure enough, Monday morning, the calls started coming in. I wasn't at my desk most of the day, so I managed to catch a couple of messages with return phone numbers. The 800 ones I called back and explained the deal - my info was given to them in bad faith, so I didn't feel that I could talk with them and/or participate in whatever they were trying to get me to do since the company they had bought my info from had cheated me. Most of them were pretty decent about it; one or two were pretty pissy. Whatever.

So, a month or so later, and what did I learn? That submitting myself to this was not worth the effort, obviously. During that time, 1,567 emails came to my special email address, for a total of 6.7mb. That's not a lot compared to what the wild and wooly spam I get from the internet, but it's quite a bit considering that I only used the email address once, in one form, for one thing.