Every day now I get several phone calls from this same 866 exchange. If I answer a moment will pass in silence, and then a shitty text-to-speech engine will tell me that it is “Vision!” calling. Sometimes it will say it’s calling for “Shane Robershin.” All standard so far. But instead of then connecting me to whoever wants to talk to me, the robo-dialer puts me on hold.
To summarize: they call me, and then expect me to wait till it’s convenient for them to process me. This practice isn’t unheard of – in other corners of reality sometimes Important People will have their Personal Assistants make calls for them; the phone rings, you pick up and hear: “Please hold for Ryan Houle.” This is annoying but way less so. First, because at least you’re being called by a real human who you could presumably yell at or tell to fuck off. Second, you only have to hold for Ryan Houle for five seconds. In the case of my robo-caller, I once waited for a minute and a half before hanging up.
If I’m not careful this will drive me into a rage out of sheer principle. Imagine someone showing up at your door, knocking, and when you answer it he’s on his cell phone and lets you know, via hand gestures, that he’ll probably be with you pretty soon, or maybe not, but you should just stand there and wait patiently till he is.
Imagine for a second that I do wait on hold, I do talk to them and tell them to quit calling me, and they don’t. What can I do? What recourse do I have? For all practical purposes nothing can be done. I could rant and rave to the person on the other end, and the person on the other end would say: hey, I just sit at this desk and take calls when they’re switched to me, I don’t have any control over anything, don’t blame me, I just work here. And in a way that person would be right.
In a way everybody’s right: the Somali pirates are right, the guys at the power company who come out to repair the exchange for the electric chair to electrocute people for crimes they didn’t commit, they’re right, the guy at the gun shop who sells to the drug runners is right, the guy who finds an unpopulated in nook in Idaho where his company will dump its waste, he’s right. Everybody’s right. Everybody’s justified, everybody’s just doing his job.