You know how to whistle, don’t you? You just put your lips together and…blow.
I now keep a whistle by my office phone. It’s a nice white one with a little key ring. The whistle, that is.
Why?
Well, I’m sick of getting robot calls from telemarketing firms — which is just plain illegal on so many counts. For one thing, they’re not supposed to be making calls and leaving a recorded solicitation. For another thing, I’ve been on the dag-blame Do Not Call registry for years. So unless they have a prior business relationship, are taking a legitimate poll or are sending a legitimate political message…they’re breaking the dag-blame law.
But of course, the illegal telemarketers — like spammers — really don’t give a damn. Their attitude is: come find us if you can. Naturally there has to be some place to send money as the bottom line of the deal. But my observation is that — like spammers — they’ve managed to hide themselves so carefully that you’d have to hire a private investigator just to find them.
For some reason, one of the most persistent pests is a carpet cleaning company that hired a firm out of Florida or some dag-blame place to make their calls.
The other one is a credit card company that starts off by scaring you into thinking that your card is in jeopardy.
In the past I’ve asked for the caller’s supervisor, legal address, phone, etc, but they say they have no supervisor, no phone, no address…because they know they’re completely hidden from anything but a full-blown FBI terrorist investigation.
Ya can’t touch em, holed up in some call center with no address on the building and only outbound calling capability.
Which is where the whistle comes in.
I wait for the exciting news about their credit offer to end, press the number for an agent…and then blow my whistle into the phone as hard as I can.
Petty, you say? Juvenile, you say? Useless rage against the machine, you say?
You bet.
But there’s nothing like a bit of whistling while you work to make the time fly.
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To Have and Have Not, 1944
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