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By Dean Norman

Rose King was a freelance writer who loved her fax machine. It was so easy to send a print copy of her writing to a publisher as soon as she completed writing it.

Then one day her fax machine printed an advertisement from a company she had never dealt with. And she would never want any of the products the company offered. So Rose faxed a message asking the company to remove her fax number from their mailing list.

The advertisements kept coming to her anyway. So she phoned the company and asked to have her fax number removed from their mailing list.

“Well, it would be a lot of trouble for me to get the advertising department to remove one number from their list,” said the guy who answered her call. “Just ignore the ads. Why does it bother you so much?”

“It bothers me because every time you send an ad it wastes ink and paper on my fax machine,” said Rose.

“That’s not our problem,” he said and hung up.

Rose had that sinking feeling that comes when one little person is dealing with a big company that doesn’t give a damn about your problems. But she had earned her living as a creative writer for many years. So she was inspired to fax another message to the company.

“Please remove my fax number from your mailing list. It wastes ink and paper on my fax machine when you fax ads to me.”

Rose faxed this message one word a time on 24 separate pages. She never received any more ads from them.

— Dean Norman

Dean Norman is a cartoonist and humor writer, whose work has appeared in greeting cards,The New Yorker, MAD Magazine, The Cleveland Plain Dealer Sunday Magazine and The Kansas City Star. He's also written comedy for cartoon shows and written and illustrated children's books. He illustrated a cartoon book for Cleveland Metroparks, Cleveland Metroparks Adventures.