When I say "offensive" I don't mean obscene, unless you count the obscene waste of trees...
When I say "offensive" I mean unnecessary, as in they already sent me this once, and spamming me is not gonna make me sign up for your courses, fucker.
Sigh.
A couple of months ago I made enquiries to a local correspondence school about some web-related courses. a) I was curious to see what exactly they would offer to teach, and b) finances permitting, I was at least half-interested in taking an accredited course that would give me a piece of paper that would say I was qualified to do what I can already do (but the actual piece of paper might help me get back into the workforce, see).
So I went to their site and requested info on two courses, Web Page Designer and Certified Internet Webmaster Site Designer - there being some obvious overlap between the two and I wanted to see what they cost, etc.
So they mailed me the info (in two separate envelopes) and I was horrified to find that a) each course was around $800, and b) more than 80% of what was in each course I already know. So I rang them, hoping to clarify...
To cut to the chase, not only did they want to charge me an insane amount to basically teach me how to use FrontPage, Dreamweaver and PSP (because, damn, I know how to do everything else, um, except maybe the XML, but I'm working on that), in order to get in at an advanced level (and get a discount) I would have to take an exam for assessment purposes, and to do that exam I would have to pay them another $400 on top of what the course already cost.
Rather than say something intelligent like, "Er, no, I can't afford that. Goodbye." I said I'd think about it.
So now they are bugging me to sign up. I am so totally unimpressed by this hard-sell I'm thinking of reporting them to the applicable watchdog group (assuming I can figure out who that is).
And then there's this skinny little envelope from Pav. I've held it up to the light and the content is an irregular shape, so I have no idea what it is, but I'm dreading opening it. Think I'll just put it aside for the moment...