I am not a cruel person.<\/p>\n
If I had a list of personality traits ranked from 1 to 10, I’d probably have cruel at a -3 or something. On the other hand, I have a very strong anti-telemarketing bias. The two traits occasionally come into conflict.<\/p>\n
Last week, for example.
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\nI’d been forewarned. My dad called up to let me know that he’d given my phone number to a telemarketer. I’m still a bit baffled as to why, apart from that he wasn’t going to buy anything himself but didn’t want the guy to go away completely empty handed.<\/p>\n
So, about ten minutes or so after getting this warning, I get a call from Daniel Valentine. Don’t bother googling for him, I’m pretty sure that wasn’t his real name.<\/p>\n
I interrupted him before he could launch into his script and found out that he was calling from India. I did a quick check of my “Cruel (-3)” trait and let him know what he was in for.<\/p>\n
“Daniel, you seem like a nice enough person, so I’m going to let you know how this is going to go. You’re going to waste a lot of time on the phone with me. I’m going to deliberately misunderstand everything you say. I’m going to ask a lot of stupid and pointless questions, and at the end of it all I’m not going to buy anything from you. I’m going to stay on the line until you<\/b> hang up. Your day will be ruined and your company will be out however much it costs to make a call from India. You can avoid all of this just by hanging up right now.”<\/p>\n
Sadly, he didn’t hang up right away. He tried his hardest to sell me on a Dish Network system that I neither wanted nor needed. It took about twenty minutes for him to admit defeat. I may wind up incorporating some of our conversation into the comic.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I am not a cruel person. If I had a list of personality traits ranked from 1 to 10, I’d probably have cruel at a -3 or something. On the other hand, I have a very strong anti-telemarketing bias. The … Continue reading