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 Hitler Channel

The Boy in Striped Pijamas (2008)

(...) Loss of urgency, loss of documentary conviction, and loss of recognition, offset by a net gain in jokes about the Hitler Channel: these are the outcomes we may expect as the pace of Holocaust film production continues. These will be the consequences of an end-of-the-year schedule that brings Defiance, Valkyrie, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, The Reader, Adam Resurrected, and Good—because only the most determined optimist would expect all these movies to aspire to the condition of Yad Vashem.
(...)

Nextbook: Lest We Remember , by Stuart Klawans

Reading the article above, I couldn't help but wish someone in Spain wrote something about our very own Franco channel. It seems to me that all nations have their own traumas/phobias, and if the American one is the Holocaust/Hitler, the Spanish one is the Civil War/Franco. As the author goes about a moratory on Holocaust pictures, I also wish there was a moratory in Spain about the historical period of 1936-1975. Of course that would do away with half of my country's filmography. IMDB lists 119 titles, and even though some of them are not Spanish, and even though a few Spanish films have not been listed, it gives you an idea of how exasperatingly exhausting the whole thing is.

Los Girasoles Ciegos (2008)

It has nothing to do with serious historical documentation and research (I have absolutely nothing again our Law of Historical Memory,explained here), not even with doing serious documentaries (although there isn't exactly a lack of those, either). I'm not even saying that all these movies aren't worth watching. Some of them are even good. But as Richard Corliss argues in Defiance: Beyond Holo-kitsch (through which I got the link to Lest We Remember), very often these movies don't make us remember these events and think about the consequences of the Holocaust/Spanish Civil War [/insert historical trauma here], but they merely become a suitable background to guilt-trip the audience and the critics, thus distracting them from how much some of these movies...er... actually suck. And I quote(because I love sounding academic)

It has become not just a topic but a genre, one that, at its most reductive, exploits the awful melodrama of that chapter in history to badger viewers, intimidate critics, elicit easy tears, and serve as a back-patting machine for serioso directors.

Defiance: Beyond Holo-kitsch,by Richard Corliss

Defiance (2009)

Ok, so maybe not all these films are even bad, and probably not every director means all this harm consciously, but it sems that that overflow of Holocaust and Spanish Civil War films makes us miss the forest for the trees. They become the artistic equivalent of Godwin's Law, i.e.:

Godwin's Law (also known as Godwin's Rule of Nazi Analogies) is an adage formulated by Mike Godwin in 1990. The law states:

"As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one."

Godwin's Law,by the Almighty Wikipedia.

Similarly, we can probably calculate artistic stagnation by merely looking at how many Trauma movies are opening this weekend. Tragedy should not be yawn-not-another-one-please. Maybe we could restrict ourselves as audiences (we've got the power!) to one Holocaust and one Civil War movie a year?