Writer Vixen Explains It All

How to Torment a Telemarketer

Share

I hardly ever answer my home phone anymore. Gave it up years ago, like a bad habit.

Ninety percent of the calls I get at that number are from telemarketers. This is how I  know that the National Do Not Call Registry is a big joke. And leading up to an election (like the past six weeks) at least 20 percent of the telemarketing calls to my home number are pre-recorded campaign pitches. Yes, I'm on a first-name basis with all of my senators and congressional reps, plus a couple of big-name celebrities. I'm all a-flutter.

So my home phone is basically reserved for outgoing calls. I assign special ring tones to my friends' numbers — they all have my cell number anyway — and when my home phone rings with a regular tone I know to ignore it. 

But I'm thinking of changing my ways. 

This awesome, short video demonstrates how to drive telemarketers absolutely insane using only a simple, three-letter word. No profanity or yelling involved (fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your point of view).

This is the most productive minute and 20 seconds I've spent in the past month. Gotta go — my phone's ringing! 

UPDATE:  Naughty, naughty YouTubers who violate copyrights get their videos pulled! As they should. Click here to watch this fun and informative clip.

 

 

_______________________________

Twittering vixenish things  @WriterVixen.

Photo Credit: Should I Take the Call or Not? by Chris Pirillo under a Creative Commons license.

Why Men Shouldn't Write Advice Columns

Share

With props to Glamour magazine's "Ask Jake," from whom I've frequently taken advice myself . . .

I can't remember where I first saw this. If anybody knows, leave me a comment. ;)

_______________________________

Twittering vixenish things @WriterVixen

TMI

Best of Writer Vixen

People are always telling me more than I want to know. This happens so frequently that I wonder if my face somehow sets up an expectation of sympathy and understanding that my personality can’t deliver on.

Waiting in line is a particularly hazardous undertaking. The bank, the post office and the grocery store offer endless opportunities to trip a TMI land mine. Like people in movie theaters who forget that they’re not sitting in their living rooms—where they apparently take phone calls during movies and talk back to the screen—something about standing still somehow causes people to forget the concept of social boundaries and prompts them to indiscriminately share their personal lives.

Or maybe it’s just something about standing in proximity to me. Clearly inspired by my utter lack of interest, strangers constantly launch into long-winded stories about their marriages, their relationships, their sex lives (or lack thereof), their aches and pains, their political opinions, their mothers.

Paris in Prison—That's Hot!

America’s favorite celebutante got grounded.

Paris was a bad girl. You might think that repeatedly driving drunk, ignoring probation restrictions, and then—repeatedly—driving without a license would merit an actual punishment.

Instead, she has to stay alone in her room 23 hours a day for 23 days. No laptop. No cell phone, BlackBerry, or television. Well, there is one TV on the unit, but she doesn’t have the remote.

Paris has repeatedly complained that she’s being treated differently. And she actually has a point. Anyone else would have been arrested and had their car impounded the first time they were caught driving with a suspended license. Anyone else, upon repeatedly ignoring the restrictions placed on her, would have been sent to jail back in March. Anyone else would have served their time in the general population among the other 2,200 overcrowded and fungus-ridden (they give you a pamphlet) inmates housed dormitory-style at the Century Regional Detention Facility.

Instead, she’s confined to a private cell, minus her hair extensions—it's The Simple Life!