Active Mind, Creative Spirit
I was going along, doing my normal house-mommy activities, washing dishes, folding fitted sheets – king size, alone – how does a person do that?… trying to decide if I’d started searing early enough to complete the roast before dinnertime. I was scrubbing the pan from yesterday’s attempt at baking and contemplating running out to the store to get a can of Guinness at 10 am. I’d woken up singing Magaritaville, but tequila doesn’t go in a roast. Guinness does. You know, your regular Monday morning thoughts. I was also thinking about socks; wondering why there are so many unpaired holey beauties and counting the hours that the roast needs to sit in the crock pot, because those are the deep thoughts I have when I am not thinking about discovering tertiary revenue sources and divergent directions for obscure online publications.
The phone rang, interrupting Jimmy Buffet-in-my-head and my morning routine. The caller ID let me know it was a telecall type of thing, and I answered it so I could tell them to remove me from their list personally since they obviously don’t understand what the national do-not-call register is. It’s okay, I am patient like that.
Inside of three seconds, the thick accent on the other end was frantically “ma’am, no ma’am, ma’am-ing” me while trying to convince me to give him details about my computer’s operating system. It’s obviously broken and he’s going to show me right now before anything else bad happens. Yes, apparently problems bloom on my computer and just in time, The Ether sends me people like this lovely angel direct via Ma Bell to fix it. So I thought I’d have some fun. He knows me intimately, of course, I am “Chriserika” and he has my registration number right here, “I’m just looking it up, one moment ma’am, just one moment while I look it up, please.”
“Which company is this?”
“Computer Services, ma’am and we have a record from Windows that your computer needs to be fixed.”
“Uh-hu.” I’ll invite a little fun, I thought. I like to mess with computer scammers whenever the opportunity presents itself. Turnabout and all that. I asked him the company name again. Now it was Computer Tech-something-in-California. I asked again why he was calling me. Obviously, it’s because I have problems with my computer and if I would just get on my computer, he would be happy to show me the problem, ma’am, with ma’am, ma’am in between every other word for politeness freaking sake.
After letting him know in no uncertain terms that I was in fact having no computer problems, he got pushy, and then we had our little dance again where I asked and he offered the name of his company, except it was Tech Center this time, not anything computer. So now I’m in the land of a million ma’ams and revolving company names. Isn’t that cute. He told me he knew exactly where my problem was, if only I’d look at my computer. So I asked which computer it was that was having the problem. Certainly if Windows gave him authorization to call and he had “my registration number” (that he was still searching for) then he would know which computer was troubled. Silence. Oops, he didn’t anticipate the fact that I have more than one computer. I let him ma’am-ma’am me for another moment before I interrupted his stream of frantic begging by threatening the BBB on him. Then I waited for him to relent and hang up. But I got tired of listening and did the hanging up myself.
My next objective will be to see if I can get them to hang up first. Now, back to my Guinness and roast.