This past week one chief executive lamented that the press never tells the good news story.
He obviously hasn't been reading Business Report because, what with the economy booming, the good news is plastered all over the paper.
But when being bombarded by the fifth irritating sales call in one day, it struck me that what no one has yet mentioned is the ugly underbelly of economic growth.
Not only is your favourite supermarket having a whale of a time, but so are all sorts of other establishments that rely on people having more disposable income. In this list of added beneficiaries, you could name strip clubs, sex workers, drug lords and sleazy sales people.
The sleazy sales people are the worst. With every bank and insurance company now desperate to ride the boom and pick up extra work, they have thousands of people just banging numbers into a phone in the hope of coming across some hapless soul who will actually listen to their sales spiel.
I've had calls from Barclaycard, Metropolitan, Liberty, Hollard, Standard Bank and more. How they got my number, especially my cell number, I'll never know.
Although I do have a sneaking suspicion that the calls have increased dramatically since I used Mortgage South Africa earlier this year and since I installed another Telkom line.
These calls are nothing but an invasion of privacy that we can do nothing about.
But there are more malicious types of targeting going on out there. As the Financial Services Board has warned, beware of financial advisers with two-bit ads claiming to make returns that outstrip the market by enormous margins.
It would be great if the board, or anyone else in the know for that matter, could be a bit more specific. But if you take the warning to heart and start flicking through the paper, then all sorts of dodgy ads jump out at you.
One caught my eye three weeks ago. Red Hot Penny Shares - The 5 Hottest Recovery Shares of 2005 - Free Report! it proclaimed.
Touted by Fleet Street Publications, it said that you could call up and ask for a free brochure on the hottest five stocks. It alluded to the fact that if you had followed their advice in 2001 you'd be richer than Bill Gates.
Well ... it didn't quite say that, but you get the gist.
So phone I did. The call was answered by a young chap called Gareth who was obviously pushing more than one brochure on the day.
He sniggered when I said my title was Ms rather than Miss or Mrs. Anyway, he agreed to post the hot-stock brochure to me.
More than two weeks later, on finding the thick envelope on my desk, I ripped it open and quickly began looking for the hot-stock tips. When I got to the end of the brochure, I thought I must have missed the relevant page and started to flip though again, and again.
Of course, there was no hot-stock information. There was a lot of bumf about how, if you had followed some unknown Frank Black's advice last year, you'd be in the money now. The brochure said this winter would yield big gains. Winter? Always a good start for a stock tip to be at least three months out of date.
Black said if you really, actually wanted tips with any relevance for the future, then you would have to apply again. For free, of course, but it would eventually cost you R1 595 a year if you subscribed - final bogus catch layered in financial mumbo jumbo.
So here we have what appears to be a crowd of con men trying to take money off people whose new found disposable income has pushed them into the realms of greed and stupidity.
So buyer beware! Lurking in newspapers and magazines today are many offers that sound too good to be true. And that's because they are.