A Thought for Message Handlers

When delivering a message to a non ham who doesn’t know you it’s
particularly important to give the info most important to the recipient
first. The mechanics of how the message got to him/her is secondary. Start
with:

I have a message from (name) in (place) for (name).

That way they know you’re not a telemarketer and they may want to hear more.
Then you can say that the message came via ham radio if the text doesn’t
have that info. You’re starting with a name they know and saying that you
have info from him/her. I have never gotten a negative response from this.
The mechanics of the transmission process is of interest to us but not to
our public. In the case of ham to ham spam, I agree with the prior comments
that blindly going from unedited lists of calls is not the best practice,
but how often do we hit a silent key? Also, perhaps the next of kin might
like the fact that somewhere, someone, has made note of the prior existence
of the loved one? And like it or not we do need the traffic during periods
of low activity of “real” messages. A traffic net can’t exist without
traffic.

In the”Sirens of Titan” it turns out that life and technology over the
course of 5000 years were speeded up by an alien whose intergalactic
spacecraft made a forced landing on Titan (a moon of Jupiter) and needed a
part which required a developed planetary technology. At the end we find
that his mission was the delivery of a message from the president of his
galaxy to the president of another. His route took him through our galaxy.
The content of the message proves to be trivial. Thus the medium is the
message. Even our spamgrams are of greater importance. But the fact remains
that delivering the message is an end in itself.