Hunting The Muse

Reading a really funny

Reading a really funny series of comments over on slashdot about spam. My favorite idea so far is to have my public email address on my webpage be the browsing user's ip address at my domain - then when I get spam, I would know what IP address the offending spider came from.

But it made me start thinking of other creative ways of dealing with annoying marketing. One time in college, my roommate and I got one of those flyers that said "You have won something or other! Please call this number and ask for 'Pat'!" So you'd call, ask for Pat, the drone would say 'Pat is not available, but I can help you!' and then they'd try to sell you something. We had great fun with that one. First we just tried interrupting continually and insisting that the letter said we had to talk to PAT, until the person on the other end got mad. Then we'd just call and start screaming. No words, just screaming. Then we sang them a song. Then we cried. The one that was the most fun went like this:

"ABC Enterprises, are you the recipient of a prize notification?"

"Uh... yeah, hey, did someone there order a pizza?"

"Pardon?"

"We've got a pizza here... for Joshua at ABC Enterprises... he left this number. We have a question about the toppings."

"I'm sorry, I don't know a Joshua."

"Look, we're just out the door to deliver it. He said he was in the same big room there as everyone else. Could you check for me?"

"Well... I don't think..."

"Come on, it's quite a few pizzas and we can't lose this order. Just stand up and call out for Joshua."

We were able to carry that on for a while - the poor lady actually stood up and yelled out "Joshua?" a few times. We then tried to act like we were radio DJs playing a prank until we just started laughing too hard, so we hung up. After that my roommate just put the number on his modem's autodial. I don't tend to get too many of those "call our 1-800 number" sales letters anymore so I think the companies must have eventually figured out that it was a bad idea.

As far as regular telemarketers, as in the ones who call you, the best approach I've found so far is to say, "I'm sorry, I'm drunk right now." That one isn't written into their scripts so they don't know how to handle it. Posted by Curt at February 9, 2002 08:24 PM