A Phone in the Gears

 

My phone rang. It was from somebody called ‘Spam Risk.’ Not again! I had gotten a few of those throughout the day. Just enough to be annoying. I declined to answer, of course. Then a few minutes later, it rang again. Spam Risk again. He must really want to talk to me. And a few minutes later…

As is the case of all honest people, I am constantly set upon by the parasites, panhandlers, and politicians of the world. Dishonest people have this complaint, too, but they deserve it. Right now I am talking about phone spam. Not phone porn, which is another type of screwing, albeit voluntary and consensual. What you do in the privacy of your own area code and whatever.

Phone spam has been around for, well, a long time. I’m sure after Alexander Graham Bell said, “Watson, come here. I need you,” Watson responded with, “This is Shyster’s Bank and Confidence company. Your bank account has been compromised! I need your account number, date of birth, future Social Security number, and mother’s maiden name,” followed by something in Korean, a modem squawky sound, a recording, and silence.

Last year the calls were of the ‘in Korean’ variety. I found out later that scammers in Korea were calling gullible expats living in the west and trying to get their bank account info in Soule. Instead of finding the numbers of actual Koreans, they just tele-blitzkrieged every number in the phone book they could find. Are phone books still a thing? Clumsy, brut-fisted, and shotgun blasted as such a tactic is, but that’s Darwin’s battering ram. What works, works. And continues, ad nauseum.

This year it’s calls from states in the US. If I see an unrecognized area code with a name like ‘Connecticut,’ ‘Kentucky,’ or ‘Insanity,’ or once, ‘United States,’ I just ignore it. Lately, the telephonic ScamServers™ have gone critical. Pitiful, but critical. I think they suck up more electricity than Bitcoin mining, whatever that is.

As I was driving home from Orlando, an hour’s drive, I got no less than 20 spam calls, three or four minutes apart. “You’ve got to be shi- You know, I rarely get calls from real people,” I thought. “And the excitement of a ringing telephone has long gone on hold!”

As I mentioned, the calls are coming from someone called SPAM RISK (Mr? Miss? His Holiness? Malevolence? Hey, there’s a new title for the pronoun crowd! Mal. Short for Malevolence. ‘Would you take a call from Mal. Spam Risk?’ ‘I think not’. ‘Very  good, sir. I will just slam the receiver in his face.’)

Annoyances, like viruses, have thresholds, above which the host either dies; thus killing the parasite, enters into a symbiotic relationship with both parties receiving some benefit and suffering some distress; kind of like a marriage, or develops some sort of immune response. This annoyance got my immune system’s attention. Since spam is all AI generated and shat out by server farms in Ukraine, we need to fight fire with nukes.

I’m thinking of writing an app called SPAMSLAM. Whenever your phone receives a spam call, it sends a 440 volt DC jolt back into the server farm and directly into the brain stem of the person who authorized it. It’ll drain your battery in one satisfying zap, but worth it. 

Not into the person making the call, if there is an actual human on the other line. After all, that person is most likely a slave laborer in some for-profit prison in Texas run be a company called Global Tea Cups or something with Kittens in the name, like, Amalgamated Kittens, Not Evil, incorporated. It was either that or blind stitch the next slogan onto Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s designer dress for the next $10,000.00/plate, mask-free egojaculation at the Met. I can see why they’d prefer being a chip in the Great Reset to that.

Though that’s probably inhumane. The jolt, not making designer virtue signaling dresses. We know that’s unconscionable.

I still can’t help but wonder. Why so many? In the last 24 hours I’ve gotten scores of illicit phone calls. Before today I got the occasional one or two. Or a streak of calls over a few days, maybe, which stopped abruptly like a rabid raccoon with a bullet in its brain, I assume someone routed out the varmint and shot it. Then nothing until the next infestation. Why am I getting so many shit calls all of a sudden? Whose watching me?

Well, besides everybody.