It’s time newspapers do away with the system of allowing people to advertise anonymously, calling for replies to a box number at the newspaper offices. This allows scope for a great deal of abuse. If the motives of a person or company are entirely ethical, then there is no need for anonymity. It is only when the advertiser has ulterior motives, or does not wish to be exposed to scrutiny or to follow-up messages from those who respond, that anonymity is sought – and so, anonymity should not be permitted.

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I still remember the days when it was routine practice for job vacancies to be advertised with absolutely no indication as to who the advertiser was. Hopefuls sent their application to the black hole of a newspaper box number. This was considered perfectly acceptable by all parties involved: the desperate applicants (and if you think the situation is bad now, you should have been around when I left school in 1982) and more so, the companies which advertised these very few vacancies. In those days, one did not think in terms of ethics and abuse in matters such as these, because they seemed trivial when people were regularly beaten to a pulp at the police depot and during protest marches, and when rampant corruption was the order of the day. But now that we have the luxury of dealing with the details of civilisation, rather than the big issues like threats to democracy, it is time to turn our minds to such things. Companies advertised their vacancies anonymously because they did not want the unemployed to know who they were. If their name appeared in a job vacancy advert, they would be besieged by the unemployed, the soliciting parents and grandparents of the unemployed, calling at the reception desk or telephoning all day, and this besides the literally thousands of letters that came through the mail. I was working at a company in the early 1980s when a call for applicants for the post of receptionist brought forth so many hundreds of letters that it took days to read and sort them. Yet that was no justification for the failure of companies to specify their names in advertisements. It was, and is more so today, completely unacceptable to ask people to apply for a job with you without telling them who you are and what you are offering. If you are asking applicants to send in a letter and CV giving their personal details and their life story, then you cannot be anonymous. Anyone who gets a perverse thrill out of such things could have placed an advert like this in a newspaper and gloated as the information came in.

Now the opposite is the case where adverts for job vacancies are concerned. The best people are so hard to find that advertisers talk up the vacancy and blow their own trumpet, making themselves seem like the ideal employer. Today, if you were to see a job vacancy advert with no name and nothing but a newspaper box number (or worse, a PO Box number), you would immediately be suspicious, and rightly so. And this is why I am so surprised that newspapers are still accepting anonymous adverts from, and giving box numbers for replies to, individuals making enigmatic requests for jewellery and watches, old silver and oil paintings, and antique furniture. Anonymity in these cases allows for far greater dishonesty than anonymity in job vacancy adverts.

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If you are one of those criminals who organises rings of heroin addicts and other people on the edge to steal art, antiques and collectibles for you, then this would be one very good way of finding sources to plunder. Just place an advertisement in the newspapers, saying that you are a ‘foreign collector’ or a ‘Swiss dealer’ who will be in Malta for a short time to buy, and would anyone who has XYZ please contact you. Then all you give is a box number at the newspaper and wait for the suckers to write in.

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Of course, how much information these advertisers actually get is disputable. But they must get some, because this kind of call for information pops up in the press on a regular basis. I suppose there is always a fool or two, the sort who wouldn’t go to a straightforward, above-board dealer because of not wanting to ‘show what I have’ and who then ends up showing what he has to somebody nameless, faceless and with no contact details. You have to be very, very silly indeed to send information about your possessions to an anonymous individual advertising through a newspaper box number – but then it takes all sorts to make a world and I am sure there are such very silly people exposing themselves to potentially criminal predatory behaviour.

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The most recent of these advertisements was a fairly good-sized one that appeared in the last few days, and which went like this: “An established group of companies in Valletta wishes to purchase quality antique paintings of Maltese grandmasters or knights for their prestigious boardroom. Top payments will be made for the right paintings (any condition or size). Immense secrecy will be maintained. Please send details including phone number to Box 9784, The Times.” Immense secrecy will be maintained. Is that so? How can you be in a position to promise secrecy, immense or otherwise, when you have concealed your identity completely? And when you insist on remaining anonymous, might not people think that you are precisely the sort of person against whom they wish to protect themselves through secrecy? Established groups of companies in Valletta, with prestigious boardrooms and nothing to hide, are well-connected enough to find their paintings through dealers or by word of mouth, and not in this cloak-and-dagger fashion which makes them seem like information-gatherers for those who commission art-thefts. Enough of these advertisements – they should be banned immediately.

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It was graduation week, and as usual, many hundreds of young people have rented mortarboards and togas for the ceremony and have hired lorries for the celebrations afterwards. One such lorry, carrying a cargo of brand-new graduates in accountancy, bore the legend ‘B. Accty (Hons) – Money, Sex, Fame, Success – The World is Ours.’ Some time soon, they are going to be confronted with the brutal truth: that the only people who associate accountants with sex and fame are the accountants themselves. It is highly unlikely that, in word association games, anyone prompted with ‘sex’ is going to respond with the word ‘accountant’. But what can I say? We all have our delusions.

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What these new graduates need – and here I wish them luck – is a reality check. The world isn’t yours just because you have a bachelor’s degree. If that were the case, there wouldn’t be enough worlds to go round. As for the belief that money, fame and success will follow automatically from here on – well, well, well. Sex, yes, of course – though it is touching to see how these people apparently believe you need a degree in accountancy for that. I hope that not too many of them will grow up to realise that the list should have read: ‘Bills. Boring bosses. More bills. A house loan. A car loan. Screaming babies. Even more bills. A sadistic boss and no pay rise. Marital strife. Adultery. Separation. Husband runs off with Russian girlfriend. Wife decides she is a lesbian after all. Rows over the division of assets. Fights over custody. More bills and more and more bills. Ageing parents compete for attention with adolescent offspring apparently hell-bent on self-destruction. More bills. Crisis at 50 when you realise that you’re stuck with your boring boss and your non-rising pay cheque, because it’s now too late to change. Cancer. Death. The only thing to do is to try and have some fun along the way, while keeping your head screwed on right.