Centerpointe's Sunday solicitors

Who are these people, and why did they see fit to enter my private property uninvited before noon on a Sunday morning??

Smile - you're on Candid Camera of sorts.  There is no expectation of privacy for anyone standing in my front yard. 

Perhaps I have a dystopian bent, but every time I hear unexpected adult voices outside my door, my first instinct is always to reach for my camera and stalk the windows behind the blinds.   If I end up dead one day from a home invasion, there'll be a photo of it somewhere. 

It turns out that these folks weren't the usual suspects selling soap or magazine subscriptions - their pamphlet trail indicated that they are Jehovah's Witnesses.  We have a "no soliciting" rule here in the subdivision, but is it enforceable, and if so, by whom and under what circumstances?  I've also never understood why these folks keep soliciting in the first place.  There are 314 million people in America and according to these folks, entry into Heaven will be limited to just 144,000 of the most worthy, which equates to about 0.05% of our total population (ignoring the balance of the rest of the planet).  Do they not think that they've recruited enough by this time?  Who does their math, anyway? 

It seems that I will go through the rest of my Sunday no further enlightened regarding these perplexing questions than I was on Saturday night, because I sure wasn't interested in answering my door this morning. 

Trash by any other name

Last June, I got fed up with rampant soliciting in Centerpointe, and posted this warning near our front door:

Since posting it, only one bandit flyer has been left there, and I opted not to "out" those folks because I don't think they spoke any English.  Therefore they weren't defying my request, exactly, because they didn't know that the request was being made.

Correspondingly, I was delighted to see this article in today's Houston Chronicle which describes bandit signs as "trash on a stick" and which describes the activities of volunteers who are working hard to gain an upper hand on its distribution. 

"Bandit signs" are those advertisements, usually professionally printed, that seem to appear spontaneously in every conceivable location: public rights of way, the lawns of government and commercial buildings, parking lots, empty fields, you name it.  They are illegal and they are ugly, turning our environment in its entirety into one contiguous screaming billboard.  That article I linked above reported that the City of Houston disposed of eleven thousand bandit signs just last month - and they're only scratching the surface.  Three full-time civil employees are dedicated to that job - peoples' tax dollars at work. 

And, I note with supreme annoyance, this trend is not limited to a growing assault on front doors and unguarded outdoor areas.  When I walk into the women's room at my health club, WHAT do I often see littering up the vanity counter in front of the mirror and hair dryers?  MORE bandit flyers and business cards, placed without permission by third parties unaffiliated with the health club, advertising all manner of female-oriented consumer crap.  Picture this: I've just come out of an hour's worth of challenging yoga, and I'm in a settled mental state.  I drift into the women's locker room to wash hands and wipe face, and the first thing that greets me is a clamoring imperative to buy scented candles that actually smell worse than my dog's rear end.  The mood suffers, eh?  And what do these peddlers imagine - that the entire known universe qualifies as their personal graffiti stage??

Trash on a stick, trash on a door, trash on a counter.  With these trashy things in mind, it is declared that henceforth ALL bandit advertisers that impact our local area will be subject to being outed-by-blogging.  We'll see you trash-distributor guys in cyberspace. 

This means war

I am DONE with these guys.  The intense building activity in Section 9 is attracting solicitors like a swarm of summer flies.  It's every day, multiple times per day, the onslaught of hard-sell cretins ringing our bell and banging on our door.  Lawn mowing.  Electrical service contracts sold by obscure middle men.  Chemical pest management.  Magazines.  Newspapers.  Security systems.  The peddling list is endless.

When we respond with "not interested, thanks", they aren't even polite!!  They back-talk even as they have the nerve to stand there unwelcome on private property!!

I reckon it's time for Plan B:

We'll see if this has any effect.

Annoying solicitors out in force today

FYI, if you've got napping babies or backshifted day-sleeping spouses, you may want to hang a sign on your door requesting that your doorbell NOT be rung.  The Jehovah's Witnesses are out in force in Centerpointe today, and there is also a security company rep driving a garishly-painted car trying to sell systems. 

• What annoys me most about the former is their tenacity and general disrespect for the existing spiritual beliefs of others, but that's just my personal opinion.  But on a lighter note, here's some humorous tactics you can use to get rid of them. 
• What annoys me most about the latter are the hard-sell tactics even when the situation is an obvious lost-cause for them: here I have a new house with a bright, shiny security sign right at the front entry and a current League City alarm permit stuck to the door glass.  Any normal human being would look at this and register the fact that I already have both a system and an active security monitoring contract in force!!!  What the kind of jackass salesperson could fail to register these multiple overwhelming indicators??!  Aaand yet he rings my bell anyway.  De-NI-al!!!  Or maybe just stupidity.

So it's just now noon and we've already been interrupted TWICE by solicitors today.  Hopefully next solicitor will be a Boy Scout or a Girl Scout, because those are just about the only ones that do not incur my wrath.