Coffee heat rising

Common sense

Idle Essay of the Day

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Hmmm….  Apparently SCREAMING into the phone does indeed hurt a nuisance phone solicitor’s ears enough that the word spreads: don’t call THAT number. 😀  It’s almost 11:00 a.m. and I have yet to receive a pestering phone call this morning.

Well. Waitaminit: can’t guarantee that. The phone has been set to block incoming calls. So…some pests may have tried to call and not been able to get through.

This is why I argue that telephone soliciting should be illegal. You and I shouldn’t have to jam up our phones and waylay calls from our friends and business associates to stop jerks from pestering us with unwanted calls.

But…with that feature engaged, my handset says it has blocked dozens of nuisance calls. I gave up counting when the thing showed call #20.

Problem is, it also blocks calls from people I want to hear from. It apparently has blocked calls from my son, for example. And no, I can NOT figure out how to change that.

Yes, I have told folks they need to e-mail me to reach me. But…why would my son have called this number when he could’ve emailed me? That sounds…ominous.

***

Nope: He reports that there are no problems on his end. Sounds like he’s working. His employer escapes the cost of office rent by making all its staff work from home. That, IMHO, is nice enough for the workers who want to make their home double as their workplace. But…not everyone does.

One should, IMHO, have a choice in the matter.

{sigh}  I was not born to live in the 21st century!

G*d-D***ed PHONE

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Y’know, I’m just about at the point where I can imagine not having a phone at all. Not ANY phone!

These days a phone — especially a land line — is more of a nuisance than a convenience. This morning the f*kin land line jangled for the third time — BEFORE 9:00 A.M.! — with a**holes trying to hustle me. Last time, I took a DEEEEEP breath and SHRIEKED INTO THE GODDAM PHONE as loud as I could manage:

G-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-H…..

The convicts hired to hustle you over the phone are wearing headphones.

So when you SCREAM into the phone at the top of your voice, that actually hurts the bastards’ ears. And interestingly, the SHRIEK-a-thon technique has cut the number of pestering nuisance calls. Quite a lot: I’d say by about 80 percent.

Telephone soliciting should be against the law.

But that would put a dent in our “freedom of speech,” right? Free to bug you and me….

Seriously, though: if you blast each ba*tard who calls with the loudest noise you can muster, that DOES bite into the flood of phone solicitations. An air horn would do the job, if screaming is not your preference.

Many of the jerks calling you in the early hours of the day (and all the rest of the hours…) are calling from inside prisons.

Yes. Phone soliciting is a prison enterprise. Check it out: just google phone soliciting prison industry, and you learn all about a gigantic scam tailored for convicted scammers and other criminals.

Hey…you’ve got a crew of crooks. Why not put ’em to work doing what they do best?

Get the F*** Off My Phone and….

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Mid-morning. This is the hour when every goddamn phone solicitor residing in the state prison system gets on the phone and heckles you, heckles you, and heckles you some more. GodDAYUM, but I hate that.

A couple of things discourage them and cut the onslaught of nuisance calls a bit. One is to simply BLAST THE BEJYZUZ out of the bastards’ ears. Get a loud horn and HONK it into the damn phone. This hurts, on their end. They make a note not to call your number again.

For me, this requires me to have a loud horn in every room: I have five phone extensions in this house.  That just adds to the nuisance factor. But I’ve learned that you can accomplish the same effect simply by SCREAMING into the goddamn phone AS LOUD AS YOU CAN. Most of the phone soliciting clowns have headphones on, so SHRIEKING into the phone blasts the bastards in both ears. 😀

And that does seem to work. I get many fewer nuisance phone calls these days, since I’ve started blasting the bastards with the loudest noise I can generate on short notice. So apparently it’s true that at least some of them have a system that flags numbers to avoid calling.

But man, do I ever HATE those goddamn nuisance phone calls. It ought to be against the law to make soliciting phone calls: period. That it’s not tells you how effective the nuisance businesses’ lobbying strategy is.

Some people, I understand, simply no longer answer the phone. They let it ring through to the answering machine and then pick up if and when they hear someone they’re willing to speak with. Tried that: found it to be more of a nuisance than the nuisance calls themselves. Like I have nothing else to do but eavesdrop on my answering machine? And then sit there and erase the messages it’s recorded?

Anyway, generating the LOUDEST NOISE YOU CAN INVENT and blasting it into the phone really does cut down on the number of pestiferizing calls. I’ve gone from upwards of 8 or 10 a day to maybe 2 or 3 in the morning.

Phone soliciting should be illegal.

Jayzuz! STOP THE WORLD!!!

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Problem is, stopping the world and jumping off prob’ly won’t do me much good today….  If I touch it, it goes SPRRROOOOOINNNGGG!!!

What a mess. literally: everything I touch is what a mess. 

Well…the computer is letting me type…sorta. We’ll see if it saves to disk, and we’ll see if it lets this post go online.

How do I doubt it?
….and….
How do I doubt it?

Oh, well.  On the brighter side, my son has kindly volunteered to make a grocery-store run for me.

On the dimmer side…by myself, I couldn’t get to the store for love nor money. To say nothing of to the store and back home. This business of kiping my car puts me in one helluva bind!  Whatever I need to get done, I can’t do. Wherever I need to go, I can’t get there.

Whinge!!!

Y’know…an annoying aspect of this fiasco is that my great-aunt and her mother, my great-grandmother, lived in Berkeley for decades and never had — or needed — a car. Sooo…why do I feel I can’t survive without a vehicle?

The aunt worked in San Francisco, a top-level functionary at Crocker-Anglo National Bank. She walked a block up the hill from her home, hopped on a light-rail train, and rode into the city. Hopped off practically in front of the bank.

The great-grandmother used to walk up that hill every day or two to shop at the neighborhood grocery store and drugstore. Then she’d haul the groceries two blocks back down the hill.

They both lived well into their 90s, with no ailments that they ever complained about. Now…they were Christian Scientists and so they didn’t complain about their ailments. Prayed them away, right?  But truth to tell: they appeared to be in the pink of health right up to their end: in their 90s.

Hmmmm…. Lookee here! This is Saturn’s Day! 

Hot dayum! Somehow, despite my good son’s offer to schlep to the grocery store, I had the idea we were in a weekday!

Man! Talk about unstuck in time!

Well. This is good. It means he’ll be able to kill a couple of hours on my errands, and I won’t have to risk life & limb walking (hobbling?) to the slum grocery store to the north of us.

Heh. Actually, that store is a supermarket. And a pretty nice one. But the neighborhood surrounding it is a bit…alarming. I do NOT like to go up there on foot, and most of the time, once in a car I’ll go somewhere else.

And therein lies the difference between my aunt’s transportation challenge and mine. It was not unsafe for her to walk from her house to the train stop, nor was it unsafe for her to ride across the Bay, get off in downtown San Francisco, and walk into the bank

Lemme tellya: you could not pay me to ride a bus or that damn lightrail into downtown Phoenix. Nor would I get out and walk around down there. That is NOT what any woman in her right mind does.

Phoenix is L.A. East…and that is not sayin’ a good thing.

Turned Upside-Down in Space?

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Holeeee maquerel! WHAT is going on here?

Just tried to call my son, thinking it’s about dinnertime — around 6:30 in the evening.

But…

No….

No, folks: it’s breakfast-time!

It’s not 6:30 in the evening. It’s 6:30 in the morning!!!! 

Understandably, he was pretty peeved at being rousted from the sack at this hour.

And I’m pretty scared.

Scared that I’m so turned around and so goddamned confused that I don’t know whether it’s morning or night!

****

How terrifying!

Well. I guess this is a signal. And that signal’s meaning is pretty obvious:

Time to sell the house and move into a holding pen for the elderly. 

Guess I’m headed for the Beatitudes, a “life-care community” that stores you during the last months or (God forfend!) years of your life, as you rot away into senility.

Dear Lord! How I would ever so much rather be dead!

Seriously: I just abominate institutional living. Hated hated HATED living in the dorms in college. And now…goddammit! Now I have to end my life that way?

Time to look into alternatives. I simply cannot wind up my life locked into a dormitory for the senile. If I weren’t already crazy when they hauled me off to such a place, I would soon be stark raving insane.

There’s gotta be a better way to go. Let’s find out what it is. And…exit, stage left.