Important Conversation
Boy, was I excited or what? Imagine picking up the phone expecting to hear the familiar voice of a friend and instead being informed, by a perky female, that you’d won a free Caribbean cruise! I was so tired of the guy with an Indian accent claiming to be Bob from Ohio and offering to fix the PC that I’ve never had. But a cruise, warm breezes, margaritas, island girls. Well, it turned out to be not entirely free, but at least the pitch was delivered by a living person.
I said how glad I was that she’d called because I lived in an isolated lighthouse and was lonely: did she have time to talk? She paused, then hung up. I guess there were lots of other winners on her list.
To be truthful, I’m surprised it took so long to make my phone into an advertising medium. I was used to ads on the TV, the car radio, billboards, magazines, the local newspaper, coasters, shopping bags, and in my mailbox. Plus door-to-door guys hawking religion. Why not the phone, too? And what about the internet?
On the computer screen it was such a relief to find ads increasingly decorating what would otherwise have been plain unaccompanied articles and videos. Sending content out alone is like pushing a kid out the door to make his or her way to school past all the terrorists and sex perverts. It would be un-American to pass a law against calling a number at which you didn’t actually know someone or otherwise restricting uninvited solicitations, wouldn’t it?