A few days ago I was in a meeting when my cellphone rang:
Me (as I walked out the conference room): Hello?
Computer: Hi, this is Jane Doe with Foo Real Estate. Since you have a mortgage loan, we wanted to tell you about our great opportunities (blah blah blah)…[my anger increased as the recording went on and on] … please call Joe Blow at 1-800-xxx-xxxx.
I hung up and called Mr. Blow.
Joe Blow: This is Foo Real Estate, Joe Blow speaking.
Me: Hi, I just got this unsolicited phone call on my cellphone and wanted to ask you to remove me from your list.
Joe: Do you have a mortgage loan right now?
Me:No, I sold my place over a year ago.
Joe: Are you planning to buy a new place in the near future?
Me (wishing I had his coordinates so I could send him a JDAM bomb): No! I just want you to remove me from your [I was going to insert an expletive but managed to hold it] list.
Joe: For that , you need to call 1-800-xx…
Me (irate): NO! YOU WILL REMOVE ME FROM THE LIST! I’ve already wasted enough time on this.
He finally agreed, and hopefully removed my number. At least the entire thing was an excuse to get out of a boring meeting.
Cellphones should have the following keys:
Escape key: Ring in 30 seconds. This is useful to get us out of stupid meetings or to interrupt conversations with annoying guests.
Charge key: Accept the incoming call but charge the caller $50c a minute. This should be preceded by a warning. The caller may choose to hang up. If they don’t hang up, either the call was really important or the caller was a computer (whose owner is now paying for my time).
JDAM key: send smart bomb to caller (only available for leaders of industrialized nations).
I just saw this on MSNBC and had to take a picture:
“The war with Iraq will continue after this (commercial break)”
This is across the street from where I work:
It looks like the war will cost them millions in Oscar revenues.
On the other hand, I’m sure some Iraq war movie will make bank in a few years. I vote for Benicio del Toro to play Saddam.
Last night I had this dream: the government paid my rent and in return I had to keep in my house some bottles containing a radioactive substance. I don’t know if I had a choice. There were two different kinds of bottles: some had gray labels and others (the worst kind), blue.
One day two G-men show up at my place to pay me. We go check on the bottles and discover that one is missing. I tell them that I had just checked five minutes before and they were all there. I realize that my roommate has just left the house, he must have taken one bottle with him. I run out of the house and see him getting away with the bottle. I start chasing him until he climbs a fence and drops the bottle on his way down. The bottle shatters and the liquid spills on the sidewalk. Horror.
For some reason I expect a nuclear explosion or something equally violent. Instead, some passerby reaches down to touch a piece of the bottle and dies a spectacular death, his body breaking up and falling to the ground in pieces. I start running away and against the wind as fast as I can, as I learned from some tv piece about terrorist attacks (it was mostly about chemical weapons, but at the time I don’t make that connection). I keep going until I wake up breathing hard.
I need to stop watching the news for a few days, all this paranoia about “dirty bombs” is getting to me.
[from cnn] Bush warns Saddam: “Pull my finger”.
I took this picture in Chicago last August.
I read this essay by Bertrand Russell. I think it’s brilliant and it makes it easier to explain to others why I gave up income in order to have four-day weekends.
