Tuesday, June 29, 2004

Note to self: Only my parents are allowed to piss off telemarketers...

It's odd for me to have more than one blog entry per day, but if I don't write this down I'm going to go crazy, a la Edgar Allen Poe's "The Telltale Heart". You see, my parents left with my youngest sister to attend her grade nine graduation. If everything went well, they would be home by nine o'clock, leaving my younger sister and I alone for about four hours. Now, during those four hours, the phone rang, and upon answering it I listened to a woman's voice asking for my father. I replied in the usual polite manner, "I'm sorry, my father (I'm not going to tell you people his name, silly readers. Who knows how many of your are perverted stalkers?)is unavailable to come to phone right now, may I take a message?" To my disgust, the woman revealed herself to be a Phone Harpy, a.k.a. a Telemarketer for Long Distance service. Remembering that my parents weren't home, the lady on the other end of the line had just left herself open to a very hilarious phone joke, and that Telemarketers really don't have any feelings to begin with, when she asked me "How do you think my parents would feel about a new long distance plan, etc. etc." (truth be told, I wasn't really paying attention anymore once she revealed her secret identity), I cheekily replied, "Why yes, I've noticed that we've had a great deal of problems with our current telephone service, because it keeps doing things like this --" and then I hung up on her. My wicked, evil, and completely childish glee (I'm really too old to be getting a buzz over such things, and yet I still do) did not last very long, as ten seconds later, the phone rang again. The Caller ID said it was an "Unknown Number", the same as it had for the Phone Harpy. I immediately felt appalled and guilty. I wasn't a child anymore, and it wasn't my phone or my Long Distance service plan to begin with, so I really didn't have any right to be rude to people who were calling for my parents. The only reason I'd played the silly joke was because I assumed the Phone Harpy would take the hint, however crude and impolite it was, and leave us alone. Cringing (for some irrational reason, I expected her to give me a stern lecture on manners, seeing as after I assured her that Mr. **** was unavailable, I foolishly identified myself as Miss ****, and she must have known that I was far too immature for my own good and was obviously not acting with my parents' full authority), I picked up the phone and remarked with false aplomb, "Y'ello?" There was nothing but silence on the other end of the line, so I hung up. Not on her again, believe me, I waited a good... ten seconds for her to speak. However, my nightmare was not yet over, for ten seconds later, the phone rang AGAIN with the Caller ID of "Unknown Caller"! I hesitated, only to have the answering machine pick up eight rings earlier than it should have! Oh, cruel fate! She'd left a message, and I didn't know enough about my phone service to figure out how to access my parents' messages!
Redemption came just in time. My mother phoned from the grad to check up on us, and let us know they were going to pick up food before they returned (yes, they don't feed you at our school's grads...Nourishment is for the WEAK!), so I had an opportunity to ask how, exactly, one could listen to our phone messages. With this knowledge, I repeated my mother's instructions onto the phone and heard this....."You have one unheard message: **Click**" Argh! All that anguish for nothing! She'd hung up. Ah well. For now, to make amends for my misdeed, I'm going to lend the Phone Harpy a shred of dignity and assume she hung up on purpose to give us nasty kids a taste of our own medicine, all nicely recorded thanks to our current (and quite sufficient, thank you very much) phone service. Well, not anymore...."Message - Erased!"

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