The joy of torturing telemarketers

Call: 13.28

Me: (pick up the phone) .......
Telemarketer: Hell-ooooowwww goood morniiiing ♫ (really)
Me:.........
Telemarketer: good mooorniiing?
Me:.........
Telemarketer: Hell-ooooowwww goood morniiiing ♫
Me:.........
Telemarketer: good mooorniiing?
Me:.........

Me:.........
Telemarketer: (hangs up)

Call: 13:32

Me: (pick up the phone) .......
Telemarketer: Hell-ooooowwww goood morniiiing ♫ (really)
Me:.........
Telemarketer: good mooorniiing?
Me:.........
Telemarketer: Hell-ooooowwww goood morniiiing ♫
Me:.........
Telemarketer: good mooorniiing?
Me:.........
Me:.........
Telemarketer: (hangs up)

Aaah... I've got a new hobby.

I must be a bad person. About a year ago, I made a huge discovery. I had been getting recurrent phonecalls from a health insurance company, which I kept politely rejecting because, well, I'm a very polite person. However, one of these calls had to be made at 9.00 AM, in July. Let me tell you something about myself. I'm Insomniac. Ca-pi-ta-lized. I have serious problems sleeping, and heck, when it is the summer time and I finally can catch up with my sleep and sleeping late, waking me up for a stupid promotion is like feeding a Gremlin after 12. A Very Bad Idea.

So when I picked up the phone and I got the usual telemarketer yapping about their usual healthcare insurance thing, I just hanged up on her. No more "sorry, not interested", no more "sorry, I have to go", no more "sorry, could you please delete me from your list", no more "sorry, I asked you FIVE TIMES to delete me from your list". I just hanged up on her. And, hey, it felt GREAT.


Enter Telefónica, the Company We Love to Hate. This company has a very peculiar notion of public relations which includes systematically pestering cellphone owners of all sorts using a very scientific method, i.e. calling, randomly, all six-digit numbers starting by 6 and checking if there is a person on the other side of the line. Then they ask you for your name, and then they spam you with whichever stupendous new offer they have concocted on their evil dome.

The weekly meeting of the marketing section.

Enter 1485. I've been getting some calls (which, given my experience, I never answer) from these guys and I decided to do a little research to find out what they've been up to lately. Turns out, there might not even be a person behind the calls, but a sort of calling machine to more effectively pester cellphone users. The fun really begins when you pick up the phone and... no one is there. They're just checking if you might be so that next time a real person all-suffering telemarketer can call.

Well. Turns out I haven't enjoyed a dumb telephone call so much since those long lost summer days of making collect calls to foreign country switchboards.

Looking forward to the next one XD.

The anthropology of soccer

Ok, so I'm not a football person. Never been. I've been known to fall asleep and sit with my back against the TV set during terribly exciting matches, and even though I've had periods when I really wished and tried to like the King of Sports (as we call it over here), well. Can't help it. Yawn.

However, the guys at the bar next door are making me switch to the Spain-Russia match. It's a very entertaining orchestra of ARRRs; OOOOAAHs; UUUUUYs and YEAAAAAAHs so they sort of spark my curiosity. They did the same last Sunday, when the penalties came up and I just couldn't resist to see what the enthusiasm was about. Which was nice, because I got to see the historical last two penalties: the one that Fabregas managed to score and the one that Casillas managed to keep from scoring. I think it was the first time in my life when football actually moved me. After all, that was history --we haven't been beyond quarter finals in something like twenty years.

The thing is, I think I enjoy more listening to people's reactions to football than the whole affair of having to watch it. Especially after a guy on the radio today has brought further insight, when he said that football is so exciting because it contains the most important aspects of ancestral hunting -- throwing and catching. Certainly listening to the guys next door one can definitely imagine that Cro-magnons hunting for mammoths ten thousand years ago must have sounded exactly the same. And I don't mean this in a bad way -- it's just the anthropologist in me being a nerd, and wishing I liked football. And catching mammoths.

Me! Catch! Beast! Now!

Ps. Keeping in line with my anthropology theory, somebody has just marked his territory the primeval way. By pissing. On my door.

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I'm a crocodile

A sad, bored crocodile....

You Are a Crocodile

You are incredibly wise and knowledgeable. In fact, your wisdom is so deep that it sometimes consumes you. People are intrigued by you, but you find few people intriguing. You are not a very social creature. You are cunning. You enjoy deceiving people a little. (?) You are able to find balance in your life, and you can survive anything.

What Reptile Are You?

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quotable quotes on King Kong

[Remedial class of 11 fourteen-going-on-16-year olds. We're watching King Kong]




Student A. "Oh, teacher, this is like Titanic but with a big monkey"
Student B. "What? are they going to crash into the monkey?"

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Imagine...

.... that all the stupid time I spend memorizing crap for the competitive exams I spend, instead, on actually learning to become a better teacher, preparing materials or, well, having a life...

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What a nice suburban story... not.

When I hear about things like these, it becomes less and less difficult to understand how some kids grow up into the ·%$"%" they become.  I suppose you can get all sensationalist and blame the Internet, or Myspace, when the truth is that the mother that created the hoax has the ethics of a vulture on cocaine. It's just appalling to think that an adult would think it's "ok" to bully a 13-year-old kid, but hey, she had "reasons"!!

MySpace hoax victim’s kin seek justice - TODAY: People - TODAYshow.com
The parents of a 13-year-old Missouri girl who hanged herself after a failed MySpace romance — later uncovered as a hoax — say they have yet to receive an apology from the family they blame for their daughter’s death.

“They’ve absolutely offered no apologies,” Ron Meier told TODAY co-host Matt Lauer on Monday. “They sent us a letter in the mail, basically saying that they might feel a little bit of responsibility, but they don’t feel no guilt or remorse or anything for what they did.”

(...) After the two girls had a falling out, the mother invented a 16-year-old boy, “Josh Evans,” created a MySpace account for him, and made Megan believe he was new in town and thought she was cool. (...)And then the boy turned on Megan, leading a campaign of vilification and online name-calling that ended when Megan took her own life.

 

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saturday night live

... been studying for three days straight. Stuck Up North so I guess it's Babylon 5 for me tonight, as Saturday TV s-u-c-k-s.

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I HATE ANTS!!!!

One of the "advantages" of living on a ground floor next to the mountains is the ability to enjoy a wide variety of wildlife. As in spiders, flies, and more recently, Ants. I've sprayed ant killer and applied salt liberally in every bloody corner of my not terribly large appartment/studio/matchbox, but to no avail. And yes, I clean. A lot. And yes, I throw the garbage out, thankverymuch.

Today has been particularly enjoyable as I found the lovely little creatures dancing near the place where I prepare the food. I've followed them right to their apparent source (right behind the drier), sprayed more useless ant-kliller, mopped, hoovered and put the drier back there.

Fortunately my mum has remembered there are some ant trap that apparently sends poison to every corner of the ant hole and kills the Queen. So I've proceeded to the shopping mall to acquire it. Well, that and a cartload of a dozen other things I needed.

And so, after an hour and a half of intensive grocery shopping I come back home and the internet is not working. I've checked all the cables (my god, have the ants eaten them this weekend?), and they were fine. I've unplugged, reseted the computer, ASKED VISTA TO RUN A DIAGNOSIS (not that I hoped it would help), and finally, figured out the problem. The phone connection is also behind the drier. In my zeal to get rid of the beasties I've disconnected the phone line.

I hate to think of the poor little ants going back to their holes and killing their queen, but then again... no I don't. I'm not a Buddhist and the $%& things almost ruin my internet connection. GO TRAP!!!

PS. In other news, it seems to have snowed in the mountains this weekend. That and the squall clouds have made them look just gorgeous. See, it's not all bad Up North.

PS2. Everything itches now. I know it's psychological, but, ugh.

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The kids are (not) allright

All over the world, teenagers give their parents headaches. Why are the migraines induced by British kids felt across a whole society? Part of the reason may be that parents aren't always around to help socialize their children — or even just to show them affection. Compared to other cultures, British kids are less integrated into the adult world and spend more time with peers. Add to the mix a class structure that impedes social mobility and an education system that rewards the advantaged, and some children are bound to be left in the cold [...]

A study in 2000 by the OECD found that British parents spend less time with their children compared to other nationalities, leaving them more open to influence from their peers and a commercially driven, celebrity-obsessed media.

Britain's Mean Streets - TIME

This is becoming more and more common over here with Spanish kids as well. And the reason is, again the same. Kids simply DO NOT spend time with their parents, mostly because both their father and their mother spend a ridiculous amount of time working. In Spain, it is common to start work at 9 and not come back until 8 or 9 pm. The idea of "conciliation" (of work and family life) is a pretty new and often considered "softy-liberal-utopian bs".

The article also talks about guess-what... yes. Ratios. Again. But neeever mind... you won't hear any politician talking about that, at least not in my country. Go figure. Maybe we'll have to wait until kids start bringing guns to school here as well.

So, continue blaming the TV, the videogames and the teachers. Because they're the ones that are raising the kids.

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Operation Chaos!

Hark! Rush Limbaugh is asking his Republican listeners to go out and register as Democrats and vote for Hillary Clinton -- which he has dubbed Operation Chaos. Once more, American politics prove Fact is stranger than Fiction...

"I want our party to win. I want the Democrats to lose," Limbaugh said. "They're in the midst of tearing themselves apart right now. It is fascinating to watch. And it's all going to stop if Hillary loses."

Can GOP Voters Spoil the Dem Race? - TIME

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Mhm. Someone should import this to Madrid

   

DOT Creates New Lane For Reckless Drivers

They drive me nuts. Especially the ones with expensive cars. One of these days, I'll go to cafepress.com and get a sticker that says "you bought an Audi, not the F$·%" road"

Just wait and see.

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I want to shoot bureaucrats, badly.

It turns out that for my examinations this June, I need to prove the Board of Education that I've been working for the Board of Education for a "·$%"% 1 year, 2 months and 14 days. And to do so, I need to go to FOUR DIFFERENT PLACES, all conveniently located around 40 kilometers away from each other, and demand for such proof at hours when I'm supposed to be, well WORKING.

This is Orwell at its finest.

gore weekend

Friday:


No Country for Old Men. Just in time to say I saw it before Bardem got the Oscars. Yay for Javi!!


By the way. It seems people who have seen this movie are neatly divided between those who loved it and those who hated it because it was slow or violent or both. Me, I did like it a lot, as it's very character driven and manages to keep a certain sense of hope on humanity in spite of the grim grim story. I really love some touches of the film, e.g. the jacket/shirt story. It's also very neatly organized, which is quite a feat considering how many threads the plot has. Makes me want to read Cormac McCarthy --I'll add it to the to-read list.


Ps. Cruellest part of the film -- Javier Bardem's haircut. Geeze.




Saturday:


Spent half of the day with my friend-of-the-seven-cats, the other half with mum of-the-eternal-home-renovations (my mum's home is right now under siege by masons, painters, plumbers, floor-varnishers and the like). Result: massive dust/cat allergy attack.



Spent the night realizing I have forgotten to dance sevillanas and remembering my ski trip -- by way of various thigh pains. Oh joy.



Sunday:


Sweeny Todd. Never again will I eat meat pie, period. Realized, mid-movie, I've spent the bloodiest weekend since that Kill Bill Marathon. Like Kill Bill, much of the fun was visual --great costumes, great sets. I got a bit tired by so much music at the beginning of the film, mostly because I wasn't expecting it (the Spanish trailer cleverly avoids the subject, as musicals don't sell well here). Then I got used to it.

Cruellest part of the film: ♪Joaaanaaaaaaaa I feel youuuuuuuuuu.... ♪ encores over dinner ;) .

Overall conclusion: vengeance is bad, sleeping with seven cats is worse.