I hate credit card companies. I hate them. It's nothing personal - I've never had any problem with them, always paying my bill on time and in full (well, I forgot one payment I think, missed the deadline by a few days. But no problem). I don't think I'm alone in this assessment*.

There's a lot of reason I have this opinion, but one of the main ones has to do with the really shady practices that you see in direct mailings. Like the one where they send you a bunch of checks. You and I both know that you shouldn't deposit these checks, because there ain't no such thing as a free lunch. But just like email spam, they wouldn't send them out if some people weren't depositing them and getting hit by the the usurious interest rates on cash advance. Screw you, credit card companies.

But this isn't about credit card companies. We all know that they are a bunch of jerks. This is about the Museum of Modern Art.

A couple of days ago, I got this in the mail:

Although I'm sure there is a reasonable amount of evidence to the contrary (posted by myself, on this very website), I'm a person of at least moderate intelligence. And when I see something like this, I assume that I owe money to the sender. And so, being fiscally responsible and having serious distaste for being in debt, I ripped it open to find out why I owed money to the Museum of Modern Art.

Turns out I don't, in fact, owe money to the Museum of Modern Art. It was a "Membership Acceptance Statement," questing for money. And it made me terribly angry to see an institution like MOMA use what I see as a deceptive mailer to raise funds. I think things like this show a huge amount of disrespect to their prospective clientele. And while the inside of the letter wasn't as deceptive as the envelope (it's not like they were sending 'free money' checks or anything), I feel like that envelope is the first step in having the find raising department of one of the worlds greatest art establishments sending out 'CH#3Ap P1c4ssssso!!!!!' spam to your email address.

*Interesting aside - I was going to illustrate the fact that many people think credit card companies are evil by showing that the number of google hits for "credit card companies are evil" was greater than that for a number of other industry types. So I tried insurance companies, toy companies, and software companies. What I learned is that people on the internet indulge in some amount of hysteria when it comes to making a fair assessment of corporations. Still, credit card companies are a bunch of jerks.