Somehow, the bridal industry has gotten hold of my name and location. I’ve been receiving wedding-related junk mail, telemarketing calls, and spam. I’ve “won” so many valuable prizes in the last few days that I must have single-handedly smashed the laws of probability all to bits. I just hung up on some woman who wanted to tell me I’d won…something, I couldn’t figure out exactly what, but apparently it was the result of “the survey” that I filled out at “the mall.” I’ve spent approximately two hours in a mall since last summer, and I don’t recall filling out any forms while I was there. “Maybe a friend filled it out for you?” the lady suggested. Now there’s a creepy thought.
\nYes, I hang up on telemarketers. Usually before they say anything, because on those computer-dialed ones there’s that irritating pause between your first “hello” and when they get around to picking up the phone on their end. I don’t think this is disrespectful, first because I consider somebody calling me on the phone trying to sell me something to be nearly as intrusive as someone forcing their way into my home and making me listen to their sales pitch; and secondly because there is absolutely no chance I’m going to give any money to some anonymous voice on the phone, so the sooner I hang up the sooner they can move along to somebody that will. On the other hand, I don’t want to browbeat the telemarketer. I’m no good at browbeating people, for one thing, and more importantly they are probably just regular people who need the money. I myself have interviewed for two “telephone survey” type jobs. One was with Gallup, it was a telephone interview with lots of deep psychological questions like “Do you like the sound of your own voice?” and “Do you ever “get tough” with people?” I didn’t get the job.
\nI did make some calls of my own today for various wedding-related goods and services. I was reasonably polite on all of them, and so were the anonymous telephone voices. See how much better it is this way?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Somehow, the bridal industry has gotten hold of my name and location. I’ve been receiving wedding-related junk mail, telemarketing calls, and spam. I’ve “won” so many valuable prizes in the last few days that I must have single-handedly smashed the laws of probability all to bits. I just hung up on some woman who wanted […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stagingpoint.com\/michele\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stagingpoint.com\/michele\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stagingpoint.com\/michele\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stagingpoint.com\/michele\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stagingpoint.com\/michele\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stagingpoint.com\/michele\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stagingpoint.com\/michele\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stagingpoint.com\/michele\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stagingpoint.com\/michele\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}