Ring-a-ding-don't

Here’s a scenario you don’t experience anymore.

It’s late afternoon on a weekend. The sun is setting outside your living room window, and you’re relaxing in a leather sofa – your feet kicked up, a glass of wine in hand, and the soothing strains of Air Supply sauntering delicately through the stereo speakers, ’cause screw the haters, man. On your lap is a magazine, opened to a strangely fascinating article about the nocturnal sex habits of Mediterranean fruit bats. Turns out it starts with the male bat biting the female bat on the neck. You smile, remembering that time in college when...

Ring! The phone! Not your cell phone; those haven’t been invented yet. The phone phone is ringing, that hunk of plastic hanging on the wall in the kitchen, next to the calendar with the photos of kittens dressed as circus clowns.

So you put down your wine and your fornicating bats, wrest yourself out of blissful repose, and trudge over to the kitchen. You wonder who it could be. Maybe Aunt Bertha is calling about the test results of that weird lump on her thigh that looks like the Crimean Peninsula. Maybe dad wants to share his new recipe for a Bavarian-style beer he calls “Throatripper.”

You pick up the receiver.

“Yes, hello, I’m looking for (insert your name here). I’m with Verizon, and I was wondering if I could offer you a long-distance calling plan which...”

Disgusted, you slam the phone back into its cradle, knock down the cat calendar, and wake up your actual cat, who was dozing on a discarded pair of Scooby-Doo underwear.

All that trouble just to be harangued by a telemarketer.

Bet that hasn’t happened in a while, though. It used to be one of humanity’s common experiences, like sitting next to a guy at the movies who won’t stop asking questions about the plot. It was once a go-to topic of conversation for two strangers stuck in a situation in which they have to be social with each other. “So, Bob, you getting a lot of telemarketing calls? I got one yesterday from a guy who said I won a gold-plated bicycle horn from the South Burmese Historical Society’s Publishers Clearinghouse Sweepstakes! What a tool!”

That’s not a conversation recognizable to these teched-up hipster kiddies with their fancy-schmancy smartphones. Or sad sacks like me, whose phones show promise but don’t apply themselves.

Telemarketers can’t be out of business completely, because call centers still exist; there’s one in a mall in my hometown of Lewiston, sandwiched between an empty Radio Shack and a store which seemingly sells nothing but Hallmark cards and ceramic cats. But who are they calling? With portable cell phones now the norm, I imagine it’s more difficult for private entities to store comprehensive databases of peoples’ phone numbers. I say “I imagine” because finding out for sure would entail actual research, which cuts into time better spent in more worthwhile pursuits, like blowing bubbles at dogs to watch their confusion. 

They must be calling the holdovers, the ones who cling to their land lines in case studies find that cellular signals cause blindness and an inability to appreciate mustard. I was a holdover for a long time, until I realized the only calls I was getting were from robots who wanted to refinance things I didn’t own. It was blissful when I finally let go of that vestige of the pre-portable era; in the past five years, I’ve experienced more car accidents than telemarketing calls. Which I’ll say is a good thing. I guess.

In the interest of full disclosure, I should probably admit that I was once a telemarketer myself. It was a summer job prior to my junior year of college. I’d drive to work in a battered Ford Bronco with an empty socket where the radio should have been, sit down in front of a yellowed computer that smelled like a hospital gurney, and spend hours calling people who vehemently wished I were dead. And you know what? I didn’t blame them. You’d think that experiencing the profession from the inside would have made me sympathetic to the telemarketer’s plight, but no. After three months of hearing people tell me to go to hell, I was half-ready to oblige them.

The reason, see, is that telemarketers’ training is basically a crash course in how to be an ass. The one directive which stands out to me, all these years later, is that we weren’t allowed to take “no” for an answer. We had to press on, blithely ignoring folks’ pleas for us to insert hand grenades into our most easily reachable orifices. Only until they gave some version of “no” three times were we allowed to wish them a nice day, even though by then we’d made that pretty much impossible. By the end of my shift I’d ruined dozens of family dinners. I should be collecting roadside trash in an orange jumpsuit for the lives I’ve destroyed.

Then everyone got mobile. Problem solved – or mostly, anyway. Roughly twice in the course of a given year, I’ll still get a random call that’s utterly gratuitous, usually from someone who can’t pronounce my last name. I used to ask to be put on a do-not-call list, but with these interruptions now occurring about as frequently as dinosaur rampages, I just hang up and go about my business. Simple. It almost makes me pine for the days when I’d get harassed by someone intent on disrupting my nightly meal of scrambled eggs and Golden Grahams.

Almost. Because while technology is a double-edged sword, a nice benefit to the cell phone era is that telemarketing is slowly going the way of powdered wigs and frilly pantaloons. Some remnants of the mid- to late-20th Century are sad to see go; not so with this weirdly invasive practice. When the last solicitous call in history is placed, it’ll be a victory everywhere for those who value peace and quiet.

Now I can get some reading done. Did you know fruit bats have lost the ability to echolocate? These are the kinds of things you can learn when the phone stays silent.