Oh Fuck Off, Betty

We all have them. Those everyday annoyances that come from living in the 21st century. People standing beside you at the grocery store on a cell phone, wondering to the person on the other end whether they should get the large can of lima beans at 89 cents or the small can at 59. Being chewed out at work because someone's bank or internet provider or computer maker went toe-up and it caused their online bill paying to stop and they're getting second notices from TheCompanyIWorkFor. Having 151 channels and still not being able to find anything on TV to watch except "Becker" or that movie where Michael J Pollard plays Billy the Kid.

Then there are the things that aren't so much annoyances, well, they're annoying, yes and no mistake, but I prefer to categorize them more as "invasions."

Spam emails at your regular isp's email address. The address you don't give to anyone, not even family members, until they've taken a blood test and passed a security check. Spam snail mails, which fill up your mailbox and cause you great distress when you lope to the post office to see your take of letters and packages for the day only to find a reminder from the optometrist and 26 offers to get a credit card.

And telemarketers. Telemarketers who call you while you're eating dinner. It doesn't matter what time you're eating dinner, it could be 5:30, it could be 10:00. Telemarketer phones have a special food-sensing device that automatically rings you as the first morsel is shoveled into your mouth. Apparently the phones have a sleep sensor as well. That's the only explanation I can come up with for the calls I get weekend mornings at 8:30.

I try to be nice to telemarketers even as I'm telling them to go from my life. I know it must be a hellish job, even worse than the one I have, and so I'm sympathetic. You know, I guess in the grand scheme of things my job isn't so horrible, it's just that it's miles away from my dream job, which I'm supposing would be couch tester. I used to think my dream job would be movie reviewer, but then I came to realize that after the actual watching of the movie I'd have to come up with something to write about it, then the pressure would be on me, and what if it was a movie like "Memento" or "Mulholland Drive" that I was too dumb to understand, and, well, eventually I'd become The Movie Reviewer Who Went Insane And Shot Up A Theater. But I've drifted from my original idea here.

I discovered a great fact about telemarketing calls - they're not immediate. That means that when you pick up the phone with a cheery "hello," there's a distinct pause before the person starts yammering. So after my own personal cheery "hello," if there's more than a speed-of-light's worth of silence, I simply hang up the phone. You may want to remember that fact if you ever call me. However, occasionally I get sidetracked and forget, like the time a couple of months ago when the phone woke me from a sound nap and I was still rousing as the person asked to speak to the lady of the house. If you'll recall, in my still-fuzzy panic I answered, "Sorry, there's no one home," and hung up the phone.

We've started getting telemarketing calls at work with alarming frequency. It used to only happen once in a blue moon, when I was a lot more timid and still quite shocked at the fact that someone had the audacity to use their work time to call during my work time. In those days, I'd quietly explain that this was a business and that I wasn't allowed to make any decisions for myself, my co-workers, or TheCompanyIWorkFor, and so I was going to have to hang up, even though I'm sure they were a very nice person and had a wonderful product to hawk. Until that fateful day. That day the telemarketers got ugly.

I got a call from a magazine-selling woman. I explained to her that this was my work (somehow I'd think answering with "TheCompanyIWorkFor" would have tipped her to that fact), and that I couldn't talk to her. But she was having none of it. She just kept on asking me what magazines I liked, which ones I subscribed to, and you know me, the eternal softie that I am, I just couldn't find it in my heart to tell her to piss off. When she started asking me wouldn't I just love a subscription to Working Woman magazine, or Southern Living, or Better Parenting, and I kept saying, "No, I wouldn't, and I couldn't read them anyway because I'm at work, though I'll be home without a job if I keep talking to you," finally she asked me the golden question. "Well, what magazine would you be interested in having a subscription to?"

"Oh - MAD," I answered wistfully. And there was a dead silence, after which the magazine lady said, "Well, we don't have that one." I started to say, "Then how about High Times," but I figured I'd fired the fatal shot already and said, "Then I guess you can't help me," and things were over very quickly. And I was free.

And that story leads me to this - they're all that rabid nowadays, and so I find no conflict at all in saying, at the first hint of telemarketism, "This is a business, we can't take this call." And if the next thing I hear isn't an "Oh, so sorry, goodbye," the goodbye will come from my hanging up the phone.

However - however!

This is now the 21st century, remember, and even telemarketing has become more evil. Now here at work we get the pre-recorded message. The Canned Telemarketer.

The Canned Telemarketer is simply a recorded message hawking a product - magazines, real estate, office products, investments, and the like. After about a two-minute spiel, the voice will ask you to press any series of buttons if you're interested in this or that, but they sadly do not give you the option of pressing a button to tell the company to piss off, or even one where you can press and listen to a man imitate a duck.

Now, the Canned Telemarketer pisses me off in two distinct yet totally opposite ways. First of all, it pisses me off that companies have become so cheap, and so lazy, that they won't even pay college students and the nongreencarded a minimum wage to humiliate themselves, they give a fee to a nice voice-over guy and everyone else be damned. That's on a parallel with sitting on the sidewalk in a lounge chair and expecting people to throw you money, this is if in fact you're stupid enough to believe that anyone would buy anything at anytime from one of these pre-recorded telemarketing calls in the first place. Which of course they wouldn't.

Second of all, it pisses me off because in the Logical Mind, one would think the Canned Telemarketer would be way easier than the Real Telemarketer on the Poor Telemarketee. You don't even have to argue. You don't have to worry about being nice, or dealing with the guilt of telling someone to piss off out of your life forever. But believe it or not, the Canned Telemarketer is not easy to get rid of!

This is because of the Golden Rule of the Telephone. "He who makes the call has the power." The Canned Telemarketer called you, and so if you hang up, and he doesn't (which believe me, folks, he never does), he's still there on your line the next time you pick up your phone to make a call. Still talking away, like you were actually interested in anything he had to say the first damn time you picked up the phone.

And so you have to hang up the phone and wait for the Canned Telemarketer to finish and hang up. And that means he's won. He may not have gotten you to push a button (though I'd push one if they had that option where a man imitates a duck), but he's interrupted your life and your work and made you prickle for at least a few seconds.

(In a stunning move of Technological Annoyance Advancement [TAA], there's also a form of the Canned Telemarketer wherein if you hang up, your phone immediately rings and they start the whole message over. I don't know what nazi thought that one up, but believe me, when his time comes I'm sure he'll have a special bed of nails in Hell with his name right on the headboard.)

Anyway, this very morning I was sitting at my desk at work trying to muddle through any number of things stacked in a pile marked "Still Need To Do." There was someone at my desk, not a client, but a person from another office of another branch of TheCompanyIWorkFor.

The phone rang and I picked it up with my cheery "hello." It was the Canned Telemarketer. "Hi, I'm Betty, and I'm inviting you to the warm beach at Hilton Head South Carolina!"

And I answered that call in generally the same manner I answer all the Canned Ones nowadays. A calm, "Oh, fuck off, Betty." And I hung up the phone.

The look on the face of my TheCompanyIWorkFor friend, who knew nothing of the kind of call I'd just taken, was priceless.

Betland's Olympic Update:
* Well, take a wild guess what I did today. I drove the podmobile - the original, trusty stalwart valiant podmobile - back from the shop to my house. Frankly, I was nervous. The steering is weird. It's hard, it's sluggish, it's like there's no power steering. Of course, I know it's all in my mind. Maybe that's what the steering was supposed to feel like all the time? If so, why doesn't the steering of podmobile2 feel the same way? Is there something wrong with it? It that steering wheel gonna come off now? It's OK, I'll calm down in a little while.