“Your
call is important to us”…NOT
by Robert LaFrance
I just hung up the phone – and I
know that “hung up” is a misnomer in this age of smartphones – after waiting 17
minutes to talk to a human and thought: “Gosh darn. Clearly these businesses
don`t want MY business.”
I happen to know that all their
operators are NOT busy taking calls, and I happen to know that my call is not
important to them in the least. Like government, bank, or insurance company
voice mails, they just want to get me off the line so they can go back to
finding other ways to ignore me.
Remember the good old days when
there was a building full of telephone operators? The last one I recall was
located in a brick building that’s still there in Andover.
You picked up the phone in Tilley
and a few seconds later a female voice asked what number you wanted. You would
say 471 and she would connect you, or at least your voice, with someone who
lived at the phone number 471. If it rang and rang she would say: “There can't
be anyone home. I think they went to the Fort (Fairfield) shopping. Ethel’s
sister works at the hardware store over there.”
PRIVACY ISSUES!!!!!!! Today that
operator would lose her job and would be lucky to escape execution for letting
out private information. Very serious.
In 2015 the world is a little crazy
about privacy issues, don't you think? Of course if we look around, the reason
is almost always that government wants to keep any kind of information from us.
I especially like (dislike) the routine: “I can't comment because it`s before
the courts.”
We had better get used to it.
Governments and every other big organization see their main function as keeping
information from the public, we who pay their salaries. If there is any excuse
for not answering a question, they will seize it.
“What time is it?” I asked a
government bureaucrat.
“That matter is before the courts.”
*************************
“O, the weather outside is
frightful, but lemonade is so delightful…”
As I walked by Flug’s house, I heard
this ‘music’ coming from the big guy’s living room. His wife MaryAnne was on a
stepladder and painting some trim along the door. I was astonished. None of
Flug’s 17 spouses had ever been of the domestic variety and therefore didn’t
last long, but this one seemed different. Could he have finally found the
gorilla of his dreams? (One of his favourite phrases.)
“Come in Bob, and have a lemonade!”
he shouted from where he was hand sanding a coffee table. I sat down quickly.
Flug and that kind of work have always been allergic to each other. I took a
whole case of lemonade from his fridge. MaryAnn smiled at me.
I left that place two hours later
with a feeling of euphoria, not all due to the lemonade. Flug, whom I’ve known
since he was a barber on Parliament Hill back in the 1970s, had finally found a
mate. A rich mate. Abigail Remelle, who kept her own
name when she married Flug two weeks ago, is the CEO of Microsoft Canada. Their
living room was chock-a-block with electronic equipment, showing that she meant
to work from home.
I’m very happy for my old friend,
especially since his heart was broken in early December when he went to Toronto
with the idea of marrying Suzanne Leonard of The Weather channel and she turned
him down. She said living in the Maritimes with all its snow was too depressing
an idea to consider.
*************************
I didn’t think I
could ever be surprised at things that happen south of our border, but they
have done it again.
The American
people have accomplished some wonderful things in the past 150 years, but they
are now known more by the totally moronic things they continue to do. Cops
shooting people in the back, Donald Trump (who defies description), the fascist
Tea Party, their Electoral College which is weird, their electing of judges,
sheriffs, etc., and O. J. Simpson – those are just a few.
Last week though
was the topper as far as weird goes, and I think it was a serious news story.
From the
Roanoke-Chowan Herald-News: “A town council in North Carolina
rejected plans to rezone land for a solar farm after residents voiced fears it
would cause cancer, stop plants from growing and suck up all the energy from
the sun.”
There
are a lot of brilliant and decent people in the U.S., but the morons have taken
over. At one time that country was the leader of ‘The Free World’. Now it’s
working toward being just a collection of gun-toting idiots revelling in their
stupidity.
-end-
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