In the president’s State of the Union address, he talked about the problems with drugs, and AIDS, and cancer, but failed to mention the biggest bugaboo in America today, telemarketers!
I get at least 5 calls every day from telemarketers, and they annoy me. Thanks to caller ID, I can pretty much tell if the call is a scam or not. Calls listed as coming from The Philippines, for instance, are probably not those of people I know. Once I am comfortable with expecting the caller on the other end of the line to be a telemarketer, the fun begins.
If I don’t recognize the number, I don’t answer the phone by saying “Hello” I answer it by saying, “Did you get rid of the body?” Sometimes I deepen my voice to sound older and I answer the phone, “Bobby? This is grandpa and here’s that pin number you wanted. Get a pencil.” If the scammer actually says something like, “Go ahead grandpa” you have two options. You can hang up, or you can give out an endless number of 30 or 40 digits until they hang up. Either way, you win.
He started giving his pitch to a “radio” audience and it was quite fun. At the end I told him, “Thanks for being on the show, and we have a little something for you. Just hang on while our producer gets your name and address.” Then I press “hold” followed by hanging up.
Sometimes you get a recording that becomes a real person if you start talking to it. The message is a recording but if you start accusing it of being a recording, a real person will come on the line. When you will hear a human voice say, “No, I’m a real person.” you know that the fish has taken the bait and you can reel it in or just play with it for a while.
Can you guys get blood out of a carpet?
District 4, Officer Friendly speaking.
You’re the 14th caller. What’s your guess for $1,000?
Call one more time and I’m gonna shoot the dog.
Let me leave you with this tip for dealing with telemarketers. If you know a foreign language, use it when you answer the phone.
German, French, and Klingon work best.
normal food. I have never had quail eggs poached in Hungarian spring water, served with shaved kale sprouts and crushed monkey nuts, and I don’t want to.
I prefer food that I recognize, like steaks, chicken legs, and Coco Puffs. In fact, I will eat almost anything that I recognize with a few exceptions. For instance, I recognize the existence of beets but I opt to stay as far away from them as I can. My mother loved beets and made them quite often. I tried them once and threw up red. Never again. The Russians make a cold soup out of beets called borscht, which I believe they invented to feed to prisoners in the gulags.
I also steer clear of sardines. I know they are seafood – which I enjoy – but they taste more like the bait used to catch real seafood. I also don’t eat avocados. They are quite delicious, especially when transformed into guacamole, but if I eat any, it’s off to the emergency room to deal with a sever allergic reaction. It’s the green food that actually turns me green.
I am not fond of lamb. I don’t care for the taste no matter how much mint jelly you use to disguise it. I confine my feelings about lamb to the lovely wool they produce but I wouldn’t want to eat that either.
Perhaps the worst array of barely edible foods of which I want no part are offals. Offals – which taste awful – is the name given to otherwise unrecognizable internal organs of animals. This includes things like the liver, kidneys, spleen, bladder, stomach, appendix, and pituitary gland. Once, while visiting Germany, I ordered offals off a menu written in German and wound up with fried cow teat. There was not enough beer in the country to get rid of that taste.
Coincidentally, Just Kill Me is the name of my new podcast. subscribe for free on iTunes.