For the purposes of training
I had two phone calls this morning.
The first was to my mobile and it woke me up. I answered the call but they hung up on me. I didn’t get back to sleep so the day started badly.
The next one came later in the morning to the landline. Herself answered and obviously had some difficulty with it. She kept asking the caller to repeat themselves. In the end I went to her rescue. I’m that sort of helpful chap.
“Hello?” says I.
“Hello” says a female who sounded like she was phoning from the arse end of Bangladesh [which she probably was]. The line was terrible with lots of scratching and crackling and her accent was as thick as treacle.
“What can I do for you?” says I, in the sure and certain knowledge that I was in for some fun.
“I am calling from Eircom about your internet connection.” She had to repeat that twice because of the interference. I was going to remind her that Eircom changed their name some time ago to “eir” [a stupid fucking name especially as they insist on a lower case “e”], but decided to let that nugget pass.
“What about it?” says I.
At that moment the crackling became very bad and there was a sudden loud buzzing on the line. That was followed by silence.
“Hello?” says I.
“Hello?” says she.
“I’m sorry about that noise on the line” says I. “I was just switching on the machine to record this conversation”. I was quite chuffed with myself with that bit of quick thinking.
“What? … Er! … Why? …” she hung up on me.
Cunt.
These people have no sense of fun.
I had a couple like that last year. An American female computer generated voice telling me I was about to have my internet connection cut off so please press 1. I did press one and an Indian woman answered but I didn’t wait to hear the spiel so she got both sweary barrels for her attempted scam. It’s always the land line. I expect because these days mostly only OFs have one.
There is probably software that cycles through numbers and calling them automatically. They just haven’t got around to altering that software for mobile numbers…. yet!
We used to be plagued with these cold/spam calls but they have almost completely stopped now. The one I got is now a rarity.
No land lines here. Fortunately (at least for me) my wife gets about three times as many of these calls as I do.
Hopefully, my attitude has placed me on some sort of “do not call” list.
So far [touch wood!] I have only got very few calls to my mobile, down in the single figures. There again I am notorious for not answering calls especially if they’re not on my list of contacts.
I get the occasional scam call.
Not Alan: “Hello my name is Alan, I’m calling from Microsoft…”
Me: (laughing) “No you’re not, don’t be so bloody silly”
Not Alan: [hangs up]
Not Mary “Hello my name is Mary, I’m calling about your life insurance” (I don’t have life insurance)
Me: “Which one?”
Not Mary: “Aviva”
Me: “OK. First let me find the policy then you can confirm the policy number and…”
Not Mary: [hangs up]
I actually miss those Microsoft calls. Any call that gets my software, bank, insurance company or whatever company wrong is fair game in my book for a bit of fun. That also goes for Amazon or Netflix as I don’t have accounts with them either.
It’s another [minor] advantage of running Linux!