How I Deal With Phone Spam

Posted on August 20, 2010
Filed Under Humor, Politics, Uncategorized | 5 Comments

How I deal with Phone Spam. Give the phone to one of my kids and let them have an interesting conversation.

spam.jpg

I used to also answer polls by giving ridiculous answers as a kind of civil disobedience. I kind of think polls are pretty damaging to society since they lead to superficial views of problems rather than actually engaging with the public. They also are pretty misleading since they don’t typically give an indication about how strongly a person feels about their answer nor how informed they are in holding the answer.

But the worst are always the sales people. Ugh. Let them talk to my 4 year old.

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Comments

5 Responses to “How I Deal With Phone Spam”
1 Floyd the Wonderdog on August 22nd, 2010 5:50 am

My daughter, home from her mission in El Salvador, answers the phone in Spanish. It blows the mind of those placing spam calls. I’ve begun answering in Korean. Even more fun!

LOL. Wish I could do that. I have done the answering as if I was a pizza place though. That’s always fun.

3 Floyd the Wonderdog on August 23rd, 2010 4:09 am

My son answered the phone “Pizza Hut! May I take your orde?”

Grandma on the other end of the line was flustered and didn’t know how she could have dialed the wrong number.

love the 4-year-old strategy. but in relation to the argument onon “I kind of think polls are pretty damaging to society since they lead to superficial views of problems rather than actually engaging with the public,” let me try to dispute that.

you see, these are different levels of knowledge. While no one will dispute the importance of deep and engaging discussions, knowing the overall trends in opinions is also important. now, combining depth and span of coverage would unquestionably be an ideal scenario, but not feasible given current technology.

all that said, what i am not saying is that you should spend your time answering the polls, but I am making an argument in favor of also giving value to information that is generalizable rather than deep.

Most of the poll questions are simply reading off ill informed opinions as if it was data.

If polls simply stuck to more objective data that the answerers can answer reliably then that would be one thing. Sadly that doesn’t constitute most polls.

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