Peggy Would Like To Lower My Interest Rate

I am on the Do Not Call list. That and $0.50 will get me ¾ of a Snickers bar from the vending machine. I understand it’s more of a pointing finger of shame instead of a great deterrent. I’ve complained about telemarkerters and there form letter response was that it’s too hard to track down people who have sophisticated equipment that spoofs phone numbers, yadda yadda yadda. In other words, we have a billion dollar version of , “If you call them, I’m telling mom.”

Needless to say, I would still get calls on a semi-regular basis for anything from surveys to political organizations to groups asking for donations. These are exceptions to the list of people who cannot call you. These are as annoying as telemarketers. These are what make me want to keep an air horn handy for when they call.

So, recently, my wife got a call from someone asking if we wanted to lower our interest rates on our credit card. She almost gave out our card number and then realized, “Wait a minute? I don’t know who these people are. The phone number came up 1-783-000-whiskey-tango-foxtrot.” She told me all about it and I praised her for realizing the scam early on in the conversation.

On Sunday, I saw the number come up on the Caller ID and decided to go after this prick. I pushed 9 and waited till the person with the less than stellar grasp of the English language went through his spiel.

“What company do you work for?” I asked.

“Visa and Mastercard. Do you have a Visa or Mastercard?” he said.

“No” I lied.

“How about a Discover or Chase card?” He asked.

“Wait, you just said you worked for Visa and Mastercard. Why would you want to know if I had a Chase or Discover?”

He then repeated himself. I said, “OK, hold on. Look, you guys called my wife last week and I’m on the Do Not Call list. So, what company is this and what’s your phone number. I’m going to file a complaint.”

“Visa and Mastercard.”

“Look, pal. You don’t work for Visa or Mastercard. In fact, I’m pretty sure all you want is for me to give you my credit card so you can steal my identity. Give me your supervisor.”

Immediately, there’s a “HELLO” on the line as if his buddy was listening in. “Are you the supervisor?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Is this a supervisor?"

"Yes."

What company do you work for?”

“Financial Services.”

“Not what department. What company. You know, the one that’s on your paychecks.”

“Financial Services, Inc.”

“That’s not the name of the company. You’re just two guys sitting in a garage somewhere in Bangladesh. If I give you my credit card number, I’ll actually have debt and you will have stolen my identity. How dumb do you think I am?”

“Sir, we are not..”

“Ok, fine. Give me your phone number and I’ll call you back.”

“1-800-384-3825”

At this point, I try to hang up and call but somehow I’m still on the line with them and I try to dial the number. I hear a “Hello” on the other end and ask who I am talking to.

“Attorney General’s office.”

“Yeah right. It’s still you.”

“Hasta La Vista, baby.”

I hang up and try to dial the number which turns out to be a sex line. Hopefully, the result of my tirade will be that they just stop calling me and I’m done with it. Otherwise, I turn my phone over to my daughter and record the call for the hilarity of it.

In any case, the take away is, do not under any circumstances give anyone your credit card number or give them any information about yourself. I worry about elderly or desperate people who think this is legit and get taken by Peggy and his band of jagoffs.

Because, after all, The Do Not Call list is irrelevant because of the “sophisticated equipment” these idiots are using to disguise their location.

WUMF: April Edition

End of April already?

WOW.  That means another Edition of WUMF is in order. For those of you just tuning in, smack yo selves!

I’ll wait. Make it a good one.

There. Better?

OK, like I said, for those of you just tuning in, WUMF stands for What’s Up My Friends. Basically, this is me just phoning in a post at the end of the month that ties up some loose stuff that happened which didn’t constitute a full post or at least didn’t happen because I was lazy.

1. Mother Nature Just Made the D-Bag Awards Ballot
This past month’s weather has been ridiculous and coupled with last month’s tornado here in my area, Mother Nature has secured her place on the D-Bag of the Year awards for 2011. Between the Earthquake and Tsunami in Japan, the tornadoes that ripped through the south and especially the one mile wide EF5 Tornado that just engulfed Tuscaloosa Alabama there is mounting evidence that Mother Nature is pissed off this year.

2. Hooked on Phonics and Beer Works For My Kid
Last month my kid’s KinderCare teacher sent home a progress report stating that she has not been mastering such concepts like creativity or spelling. After putting aside the ‘My kid is a genius, you’re wrong!’ mentality, I began questioning my daughter on why she doesn’t seem to be showing how smart she is in school.

Her answers amounted to, “I don’t like answering the teacher when she asks me those questions.” That tells me that she knows the answers but just doesn’t want to be an organ grinder monkey and perform on cue.

First, her creativity and ability to solve problems in a creative manner shone through this Easter as she decorated the house, on her own using an empty Scooby-Doo Rohgurt box and a Silly Bandz to create a hanging decoration. She realized that the open flap of the box wouldn’t hang on the nail, so she attached the Silly Bandz as a way to hang on the nail.

Next we worked on letters and numbers. We’ve been working in a book that has all kinds of activities surrounding letters and numbers. She does a pretty mean connect the dots exercise, calling out all the letters and numbers by name. However, the most impressive feat of intelligence was being able to spell “Pittsburgh”, “Steelers”, and “Moosehead” from the various signs around the restaurant/bar that we often go to for dinner. We didn’t even have to prompt her. She willingly says, “That is spelled…” So, it’s not that she’s dumb. She would rather do it on her own time… at the bar.

3. Golf Season starts for the Penguins
Last night was a frustrating loss at the hands of the Tampa Bay Lightning. Considering how the Pens got to the playoffs after losing Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin to injuries and Matt Cooke to stupidity I can say that they really did perform beyond expectations. This is a team that found a way to win during the regular season with so many issues. However, when you get to playoff hockey, you need a little more. They just didn’t have it. Haters will say, “Kovalev did nothing.” “Neal underperformed.” “Fleury fell apart.” “The fans lost faith.” And there is some truth to that. But the reality is that this team did way more than it should have done, given its makeup and they were playing with House Money.

Tampa Bay is not a Stanley Cup winning team, this year. They aren’t. But they were better than the Pens and managed to overcome a three game deficit and win. 

Game Sevens are notoriously bad luck for the Pens and yet it should never have come to that. Fleury shares some blame for that but the scoring was just not there. You cannot expect a team to go into a playoff run without having the ability to score on the Power Play. For as much blame as there is to be heaped on Fleury, who played awesomely during Game Seven, there is just as much blame to be placed on the offense. Now, Fleury did fall for that play behind the net leading to Tampa Bay’s only score of the game. We saw that in Game Si. But the defense should have picked up the blind spot and let Fleury try to follow the puck if they happened to not pull off that move and wrap around the front.

Finally, it was not meant to be. Believing this team could win a Stanley Cup was wishful thinking, at best. It is a better thing that they would not have had to face The Caps in round two, because the disappointment would have been all that much greater. There would have been hopes that Crosby would have come back to square off against Ovie and had he not, it would have crushed the city that much more. Let him take the off season to fully recover from the concussions and we’ll try again next year.   Just do me a favor, powers that be, do not schedule Pensguins' playoff hockey games on the same night as Pirates games.  It seems that every time the Pirates would win, the Pens would lose.  Pittsburgh has somehow fallen off its axis and PAT buses, all three of them have started sliding up the sides of skyscrapers, Inception style.

4.  Bailey, Pick Up Line One
Some outfit with the University of Chicago keeps calling my house to do a survey about kids. After the first couple of times of getting no messages on my machine I called them back. I asked them to take my number off the list and they said sure. They promptly called two more times the next week. I answered one of them and asked them again to remove my number from their list. They promptly called me two more times this week.

My daughter got a tape recorder for Easter. My mother read a bunch of books and recorded her voice to tape for my kid to play and read along. While this may seem like a totally unrelated piece of useless information, I plan on putting a blank tape in the recorder and waiting until the next time the bastards call back. Then, I’ll let my kid answer the phone and record the call from the phone in the other room. Hilarity will ensue and maybe they’ll get the point.

Here’s to May.



Do Not Call...Waiting Into That Good Night

Do Not Call Waiting into that good night,

Telemarketers should burn on weekend days,

Rage, rage against the phone's blinking light.



Though wise men turn off their ringer and know that it is right,

Because their peace is valuable and want no interruptions they

Do Not Call Waiting into that good night.



Working men, the last hours by, crying "Enough, All Right!"

The answering machine keeps the evil at bay,

Rage, rage against the phone's blinking light.



Tired men who get caught by a survey about their next flight,

And learn, too late, Caller ID would show the way,

Do Not Call Waiting into that good night.



Desperate men, with sleeping babies, who tip toe around at night.

Red eyes blaze at the sight of "Out of Area" on their phone display,

Rage, rage against the phone's blinking light.



You, my phone company, there on lofty height,

Curse you, Private Callers still come through. Bless me, I pray.

Do Not Call Waiting into that good night,

Rage, rage against the phone's blinking light.

Ok, so I just murdered Dylan Thomas' most accessible work. Seriously, though, with the onslaught of political phone calls I've been getting, someone needs to die. I'm not going to go into my own personal views on politics. Save that for the blogs who cater to that kind of thing. This is about the phones and how they ring incessantly when I have just put my daughter down for a nap.

Growing up we didn't have all the luxuries that we have not. I'm not talking about having to walk to school, uphill, both ways, through three feet of snow. I'm talking about call waiting, call forwarding, and additional phone lines in the house. In fact, my parents still do not have call waiting at their house. Until a couple of years ago, they still had the same phone in their kitchen. It was a rotary phone with a 500 ft cord that was only usable short of two feet. It was coiled and knotted up into something that resembled a dreadlock. Let me give you an example of how bad this was. The phone rings and you go to answer it. You go to take a couple of steps from the phone trying to utilize that football field long cord, only to have it bunch up. As you reach for a pen and paper, the phone pulls off the wall and onto the floor. You could spend days trying to untangle that cord. To put it bluntly, Stevie Wonder would have better luck at solving a Rubik's cube.

When we moved into our new house circa 1985, my parents installed an additional phone line for my older brother and sister, who were in late teens. It was a phone line that existed in all the bedrooms but my parents'. That way, they could talk to whomever they wanted and not tie up the regular phone. Being that my father is an insurance agent, he tends to get calls from his clients in the evenings, especially if they've had a car accident or otherwise. Still, they had one phone, another rotary model, and they had to share it. So, it sat outside one of their bedrooms on the floor near the stairway so you could hear it. Then, if you went to bed early, you ended up killing yourself after tripping on the phone cord and falling down the stairs. Still, I told all my friends and a few that weren't that they could call me on my private line. Just as long as it wasn't during dinner and after I was done with my homework. Oh, and not on Monday's at eight, either. I'll be watching MacGyver. I felt so empowered that at the age of 11, I had my own phone line. Although, my name wasn't listed alongside my siblings in the phone book and, if they were home, I couldn't even look at the phone, let alone use it.

The next issue we had was that our phone number, which has been my parents’ phone number for more than 33 years, was so similar to a lot of other phone numbers. We had calls from people looking for AT&T. They had the same prefix and last four digits as us but had the 1-800 in front of their number. We also had people looking for the driver of a local senator. For years, I asked my parents why they never changed their number if it was such a pain in the ass to get a lot of calls from people with the wrong number. Their response was, "Let AT&T change their number. We had ours first." Of course, to this day, you always hear how AT&T continually gets calls looking for my father. "I'm sorry sir. I feel bad that someone hit your car, but we are the phone company."

We also didn't have an answering machine. Let me rephrase that. We didn't have an answering machine that worked properly. The outgoing message sounded like it was recorded with the same equipment that was used during Watergate and the incoming messages were better interpreted by someone at NASA than in my house. When I began my five year mission to graduate from college I got my first taste of voice mail. I spent hours coming up with the perfect messages that would be funny yet entice people to leave me praise in lieu of an actual message. "Hello, we called to let you know you are in delinquent on your student loan. But, you know what? That was such a fantastic greeting that we are going to just rip up your records. Have a nice day." I ended up spending more time recording the messages than I ever did on the phone.

When it came time for me to finally have a phone of my own I was in my mid twenties. My carefree nature began to dwindle and this once social moth soon became a hermit. Don't call me. I don't want to talk to anyone. I just want to sit alone in the dark and get old. Why is it that we go from an age of wanting to have access to a private phone line and the recognition of our name in the phone book that would make Navin Johnson say, "Simmer down," to an age where we want our number unlisted and Caller ID and answering machine have replaced the normality of picking up the phone and saying, "Hello" to someone? Is it us or is it THEM. You know who I mean. Those bastards that want to sell you something. Those freaks that want to discuss your long distance or credit card habits. I'm not talking about bill collectors. I mean Telemarketers. While I feel bad for the poor bastard on the other end of the phone line when I go off on them, I am reminded that they chose to work in that field and they chose to call me. Gloves off, game on, it's go time, mofo. "My prediction? Pain."

I love how telemarketers have gone to great lengths to get around Do Not Call regulations. You think if they put that much time and energy into contacting me about my long distance carrier, think about what they could accomplish for worthwhile causes. They could be calling foundations and other trusts getting grants and donations for medical research. When will they learn that no one is going to embrace a telemarketer? If they do, it's probably someone who is lonely and hasn't had a phone call in years. I remember a particular incident where I was trying to call a bowling alley to get information for a group of friends. I misdialed the number and ended up talking to this sweet old lady in a nursing home. It was right around Christmas and I felt sorry for her. She was alone and her family hadn't even come to see her for the holidays. I put aside my hurried nature and spent five minutes letting her talk. She understood that I called the wrong number but was overjoyed that she got to speak to someone after such a long time. At the end of the call, I wished her Happy Holidays and went on my way. I'm sure she's no longer around but for one brief moment, I felt as if the phone was finally used in the manner to which is was meant. Instead of using it to sell something or ask someone if their refrigerator is running, I used it to communicate. I reached out and touched someone and they didn't have to pay $5.95 a minute for it.

It used to be that people looked at phones as an instrument of evil. These electronic gadgets will cause the death of human interaction. Then as we moved into the end of the 20th century, people looked at email as the death of human interaction. Now, instead of speaking to someone, you can send them an instant letter. Cell phones in all their razr sidekick chocolatey goodness has replaced both instruments by allowing us to talk to someone or text them. I mostly use my cell phone for taking pictures. I bet there are people out there that have replaced their talking minutes with text and data minutes. If we continue this trend, in 1000 years or so, we may have lost the ability to speak, altogether. Some scientists theorize that we may evolve into eight toed mammals just like our appendix has become a vestigial structure, not really having a purpose other than to be removed when it gets infected. Since we are so bent on using technology to communicate with each other, the art of writing as well as proper grammar will disappear as we tend to type most communications, disregarding writing standards, to which I am a repeat offender I'm afraid. Who knows? Perhaps aliens will travel to our planet and find fossilized human remains consisting of eight toes, no vocal cords, and enlarged thumb bones. They will ponder why our culture needed big thumbs. They may postulate that maybe it were a civilization of hitchhikers or maybe because of the deep space transmission of television waves we were a cult that worshipped Arthur Fonzerelli, yet lacked the ability to say "Ayyyy!" They won't understand that we lost the need to speak due to our enlarged thumbs perfect for texting. They will find drawings on ruins and strange lettering. They will try to piece together our language from the phrases, "OMG" and "ROTFLMAO."

Of course, this is all speculation and I'm sure nowhere did Nostradamus write, "IMHO teh world will be FUBAR from to BFF n00bs who got pwned in WOW and decided to say WTF, let's flame this POS world." At least he could get through one of his writings without a phone call from someone claiming that he was signed up for their service and they wanted to do a courtesy call to check on them while his nine month old daughter is trying to nap. They didn't disturb his five minutes of peace from chasing her around the living room after the cats' tail and trying to put a piece of lint in her mouth. No. No. He didn't have to collect all the phones and turn down the ringers in hopes that she got a full two hour nap and didn't wake up cranky. I'm just saying. By the way, anybody else getting hang up calls from (484)-548-6400 or (610) 571-2709. These bastards keep calling and there is no one there. They always call during the baby's nap and I want to rage, rage against the phone's blinking light!

Ok, so I just murdered Dylan Thomas' most accessible work. Seriously, though, with the onslaught of political phone calls I've been getting, someone needs to die. I'm not going to go into my own personal views on politics. Save that for the blogs who cater to that kind of thing. This is about the phones and how they ring incessantly when I have just put my daughter down for a nap.

Growing up we didn't have all the luxuries that we have not. I'm not talking about having to walk to school, uphill, both ways, through three feet of snow. I'm talking about call waiting, call forwarding, and additional phone lines in the house. In fact, my parents still do not have call waiting at their house. Until a couple of years ago, they still had the same phone in their kitchen. It was a rotary phone with a 500 ft cord that was only usable short of two feet. It was coiled and knotted up into something that resembled a dreadlock. Let me give you an example of how bad this was. The phone rings and you go to answer it. You go to take a couple of steps from the phone trying to utilize that football field long cord, only to have it bunch up. As you reach for a pen and paper, the phone pulls off the wall and onto the floor. You could spend days trying to untangle that cord. To put it bluntly, Stevie Wonder would have better luck at solving a Rubik's cube.

When we moved into our new house circa 1985, my parents installed an additional phone line for my older brother and sister, who were in late teens. It was a phone line that existed in all the bedrooms but my parents'. That way, they could talk to whomever they wanted and not tie up the regular phone. Being that my father is an insurance agent, he tends to get calls from his clients in the evenings, especially if they've had a car accident or otherwise. Still, they had one phone, another rotary model, and they had to share it. So, it sat outside one of their bedrooms on the floor near the stairway so you could hear it. Then, if you went to bed early, you ended up killing yourself after tripping on the phone cord and falling down the stairs. Still, I told all my friends and a few that weren't that they could call me on my private line. Just as long as it wasn't during dinner and after I was done with my homework. Oh, and not on Monday's at eight, either. I'll be watching MacGyver. I felt so empowered that at the age of 11, I had my own phone line. Although, my name wasn't listed alongside my siblings in the phone book and, if they were home, I couldn't even look at the phone, let alone use it.

The next issue we had was that our phone number, which has been my parents’ phone number for more than 33 years, was so similar to a lot of other phone numbers. We had calls from people looking for AT&T. They had the same prefix and last four digits as us but had the 1-800 in front of their number. We also had people looking for the driver of a local senator. For years, I asked my parents why they never changed their number if it was such a pain in the ass to get a lot of calls from people with the wrong number. Their response was, "Let AT&T change their number. We had ours first." Of course, to this day, you always hear how AT&T continually gets calls looking for my father. "I'm sorry sir. I feel bad that someone hit your car, but we are the phone company."

We also didn't have an answering machine. Let me rephrase that. We didn't have an answering machine that worked properly. The outgoing message sounded like it was recorded with the same equipment that was used during Watergate and the incoming messages were better interpreted by someone at NASA than in my house. When I began my five year mission to graduate from college I got my first taste of voice mail. I spent hours coming up with the perfect messages that would be funny yet entice people to leave me praise in lieu of an actual message. "Hello, we called to let you know you are in delinquent on your student loan. But, you know what? That was such a fantastic greeting that we are going to just rip up your records. Have a nice day." I ended up spending more time recording the messages than I ever did on the phone.

When it came time for me to finally have a phone of my own I was in my mid twenties. My carefree nature began to dwindle and this once social moth soon became a hermit. Don't call me. I don't want to talk to anyone. I just want to sit alone in the dark and get old. Why is it that we go from an age of wanting to have access to a private phone line and the recognition of our name in the phone book that would make Navin Johnson say, "Simmer down," to an age where we want our number unlisted and Caller ID and answering machine have replaced the normality of picking up the phone and saying, "Hello" to someone? Is it us or is it THEM. You know who I mean. Those bastards that want to sell you something. Those freaks that want to discuss your long distance or credit card habits. I'm not talking about bill collectors. I mean Telemarketers. While I feel bad for the poor bastard on the other end of the phone line when I go off on them, I am reminded that they chose to work in that field and they chose to call me. Gloves off, game on, it's go time, mofo. "My prediction? Pain."

I love how telemarketers have gone to great lengths to get around Do Not Call regulations. You think if they put that much time and energy into contacting me about my long distance carrier, think about what they could accomplish for worthwhile causes. They could be calling foundations and other trusts getting grants and donations for medical research. When will they learn that no one is going to embrace a telemarketer? If they do, it's probably someone who is lonely and hasn't had a phone call in years. I remember a particular incident where I was trying to call a bowling alley to get information for a group of friends. I misdialed the number and ended up talking to this sweet old lady in a nursing home. It was right around Christmas and I felt sorry for her. She was alone and her family hadn't even come to see her for the holidays. I put aside my hurried nature and spent five minutes letting her talk. She understood that I called the wrong number but was overjoyed that she got to speak to someone after such a long time. At the end of the call, I wished her Happy Holidays and went on my way. I'm sure she's no longer around but for one brief moment, I felt as if the phone was finally used in the manner to which is was meant. Instead of using it to sell something or ask someone if their refrigerator is running, I used it to communicate. I reached out and touched someone and they didn't have to pay $5.95 a minute for it.

It used to be that people looked at phones as an instrument of evil. These electronic gadgets will cause the death of human interaction. Then as we moved into the end of the 20th century, people looked at email as the death of human interaction. Now, instead of speaking to someone, you can send them an instant letter. Cell phones in all their razr sidekick chocolatey goodness has replaced both instruments by allowing us to talk to someone or text them. I mostly use my cell phone for taking pictures. I bet there are people out there that have replaced their talking minutes with text and data minutes. If we continue this trend, in 1000 years or so, we may have lost the ability to speak, altogether. Some scientists theorize that we may evolve into eight toed mammals just like our appendix has become a vestigial structure, not really having a purpose other than to be removed when it gets infected. Since we are so bent on using technology to communicate with each other, the art of writing as well as proper grammar will disappear as we tend to type most communications, disregarding writing standards, to which I am a repeat offender I'm afraid. Who knows? Perhaps aliens will travel to our planet and find fossilized human remains consisting of eight toes, no vocal cords, and enlarged thumb bones. They will ponder why our culture needed big thumbs. They may postulate that maybe it were a civilization of hitchhikers or maybe because of the deep space transmission of television waves we were a cult that worshipped Arthur Fonzerelli, yet lacked the ability to say "Ayyyy!" They won't understand that we lost the need to speak due to our enlarged thumbs perfect for texting. They will find drawings on ruins and strange lettering. They will try to piece together our language from the phrases, "OMG" and "ROTFLMAO."

Of course, this is all speculation and I'm sure nowhere did Nostradamus write, "IMHO teh world will be FUBAR from to BFF n00bs who got pwned in WOW and decided to say WTF, let's flame this POS world." At least he could get through one of his writings without a phone call from someone claiming that he was signed up for their service and they wanted to do a courtesy call to check on them while his nine month old daughter is trying to nap. They didn't disturb his five minutes of peace from chasing her around the living room after the cats' tail and trying to put a piece of lint in her mouth. No. No. He didn't have to collect all the phones and turn down the ringers in hopes that she got a full two hour nap and didn't wake up cranky. I'm just saying. By the way, anybody else getting hang up calls from (484)-548-6400 or (610) 571-2709. These bastards keep calling and there is no one there. They always call during the baby's nap and I want to rage, rage against the phone's blinking light!