The sound of silence
Oct. 9th, 2003 04:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
greatbearCan you hear it?
Better yet, are you NOT hearing it?
The telephone ringer. And your answering machine. They are suddenly a lot less active than they had been.
If you are like me, you probably been inundated with so many telemarketing calls that you had to make changes. I added an answering machine many years ago to not only take messages while I was out, but to screen calls during dinnertime and those occasions when I did not want to be bothered and would call whomever it was back when I was more talkative. I also screened out the spam calls at those times. After a while I added Caller ID as another defense mechanism when the telecrap began to equal the 'good' calls. In the last year or two I basically had to turn OFF the answering machine to stop it from being filled with sales pitches that would accumulate when I wasnt there to hang up on them.
In the last week or two, there has been this eerie silence. The phone stopped ringing at least a half dozen times during the day, and my answering machine actually contains only important messages these days.
The silence is deafening! But, oh, how gloriously so.
I have even been able to do something I havent been able to do in years - I am picking up the phone when it rings without checking the Caller ID to relive the days when each phone call held a little surprise in the person on the other end. To do that in recent years would more often than not result in having to defend myself against some stoopid sales pitch, or a dead-air earful of silence as some robodialer maximizing call penetration had me in it's grasp and was summarily dumped. No, this time it was "I wonder who that can be" as I picked up the phone and heard a voice of a friend and did not already know who was calling via the caller ID display.
Man, that is so nice. Those tiny little mysteries that add up and make life oftentimes more pleasant. Not to mention a nice reduction in those smarmy intrusions. Life is a tiny, though measurable amount better for me, and lots of others now.
In this case, silence is golden.
Better yet, are you NOT hearing it?
The telephone ringer. And your answering machine. They are suddenly a lot less active than they had been.
If you are like me, you probably been inundated with so many telemarketing calls that you had to make changes. I added an answering machine many years ago to not only take messages while I was out, but to screen calls during dinnertime and those occasions when I did not want to be bothered and would call whomever it was back when I was more talkative. I also screened out the spam calls at those times. After a while I added Caller ID as another defense mechanism when the telecrap began to equal the 'good' calls. In the last year or two I basically had to turn OFF the answering machine to stop it from being filled with sales pitches that would accumulate when I wasnt there to hang up on them.
In the last week or two, there has been this eerie silence. The phone stopped ringing at least a half dozen times during the day, and my answering machine actually contains only important messages these days.
The silence is deafening! But, oh, how gloriously so.
I have even been able to do something I havent been able to do in years - I am picking up the phone when it rings without checking the Caller ID to relive the days when each phone call held a little surprise in the person on the other end. To do that in recent years would more often than not result in having to defend myself against some stoopid sales pitch, or a dead-air earful of silence as some robodialer maximizing call penetration had me in it's grasp and was summarily dumped. No, this time it was "I wonder who that can be" as I picked up the phone and heard a voice of a friend and did not already know who was calling via the caller ID display.
Man, that is so nice. Those tiny little mysteries that add up and make life oftentimes more pleasant. Not to mention a nice reduction in those smarmy intrusions. Life is a tiny, though measurable amount better for me, and lots of others now.
In this case, silence is golden.
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no subject
Date: 2003-10-13 12:52 pm (UTC)Yay for Dave Barry hating telemarketers!!