A Robot Invasion
The year was 2002, i can remember it very clearly, the phone rang at our house and of course i went to answer, i said “Hello” and a womens voice came from the other end saying “Hello you have won a cruise trip for two etc etc” Something similar to that, after several more calls like that during that year i found out that i had been tricked, i remember where i had given my name and phone number , it was at the mall
where there was a beautiful car inside the mall and it said “Enter to win this car” it was free to enter and i could not figure out why it was free, so i filled the info which was just, name, address and phone number and email, i never won the car but they tricked me in giving my information that was later used to call me and offer me all kinds of things.
After a while, i was getting so many calls that we decided to cut the home phone service and just use our cell phones, at least those were still free of the invaders from telemarketers.
But one day a few years later i got a call on my cell phone, “Hello, you have just won a trip to the Caribbean” oh no i remember thinking, not my cell phone, by then they had advanced technologically to where they were not real humans talking but recordings of humans, i later found out that a computer or computers were actually doing the dialing at high velocity so they could call thousands of people in just a few seconds, and when somebody answered they were automatically transferred to a recording, that’s when it hit me, they were robot callers that probably did not have bodies like in the movies because they didn’t need them they just had a brain (computer) that did the job, they had eliminated the human behind the call.
Now what was i going to do, i needed my cell phone to answer my clients, my cell phone was my way of selling my products and if i can’t get my calls because of the robots i will lose money.
I got a tip from a friend that also depended on his cell phone for his sales, he told me to get an app that would screen your calls and tell you when they were marketers and when they were actual people, so i downloaded the app and it worked, the only problem is i am getting one call every 5 to 10 minutes and most of them are telemarketers but i still have to look at my phone screen to see if the call is a telemarketer or if it’s a real customer, and now what the invaders are doing is using local numbers to fool the app and get the call through, i still was wasting time in just looking at the phone screen so i decided to put a big notice on my website, that said ” My phone number has been kidnapped by the telemarketers and can not answer the phone anymore, please leave a voice message and i will get back to you immediately”, it worked because the telemarketers do not leave messages in voicemail but then they started to leave messages, there are not too many voice messages but they have found a way, so i decide to include in my big notice on my website “Leave a text or email me”
For now it’s working but i don’t know what’s going to happen in the future where cells phones are going to be obsolete because of the robot callers.
I am getting a bit paranoid from commercials and adds that are getting out of hand, i also cut the cable service because of the endless commercials on tv, they didn’t use to be so many commercials on tv before, and the other thing is that i am sure that they know i am 65 years old because all the commercials are of medicines for people of my age, are they now sending commercials depending on the age of the viewers in the house?. So out goes the cable service with all the HBOs and everything else, they weren’t worth the money anyway, especially the local channels.
So i love Netflix and Hulu and amazon prime, they at least give you the option of no commercials plans, i don’t think i’ll go back to the old style of TV watching.
Don’t get me wrong i am not racist i love all robots i just don’t like the ones that are trying to sell me something on the phone or emails or text or tv, if a robot wants to come to my house and watch football and have a beer he can come anytime, but the ones trying to sell me something are not welcome, period, oh and the Jehova Witnesses are not welcome either.
So what does this have to do with photography, nothing i just had to get it out of my chest like they say, now i feel a little better. Oh and by the way the “Do not call list” does not work, i am sure it’s managed by the robots because as soon as i put my phone number in that list i started to get more calls.
I am sure that in the future if there’s a war in which robots fight against humans it’s not the robots that will be making war it’s going to be a very small group of humans behind all the robots, the robots will be just another weapon.
If you have had the same problem with telemarketers and have found a solution please let me know thank you.
Written by a real human “Juan Ortega”