Saturday, September 8, 2007

Capitalism At Its Finest

...and, in a truly fell stroke of irony, shortly after my last blog post I received the following e-mail:

Locate Registered Sex Offenders Living In Your Neighborhood

New registered sex offenders may have recently moved into your neighborhood or your city. Let us help you locate them with a quick search so you can better protect your loved ones.

I click on the link, which offers me a "Free search for sex offenders in my area." Inputting my zip code reveals that -- gasp! -- there is 1 sexual offender located in my immediate area. And, for a small activation fee, they'll tell me who he is!

That's right -- if you don't give us money, strangers could rape your children. Yeesh.

2 comments:

Iktomi said...

in our workplace, we are actually required to print off that information and give to all the staff to read, memorize, and inital, and also to have a copy at each elementary school. we're supposed to "keep an eye out" for them.
ok yes as a child care service we should be aware of strangers etc... but come on... if i see some shifty looking character eyeing the kids playing on the fringes of the playground i'm going to be prepared, but i'm not going to memorize all the convicted sex offenders within a several mile radius just so i can scream and protectively huddle around the kids if i see one walking down the street. :P

Laughing Writer said...

They made us all at RCTC plenty aware that there is, in fact, a level 3 sex offender taking classes where we are and that we are to 'watch out' for suspicious activity. We were notified by email and a public announcement online and also it was on the front page of the RCTC newspaper, The Echo. They published a picture of him and his name. They did all but say "If you see him, run away! He commits evil acts so make sure you're safe... if he did it once, he'll do it again."
This kind of attitude gets me irked.

Going along with what Iktomi (Hi Iktomi!) said, where I work, I'm not required to memorize or sign anything unusual, but we are required to have all doors locked at all time so no one can get in. (Which, a few years ago was set up to lock from the inside so that no child could 'escape' and leave the room) A few times over the last couple years people have snuck into the building, most caught by our staff tho...