That is the word of the day that means "I want to strangle the nearest idiot."
Spam seems to abound. There's e-mail spam. Snail mail spam. Fax spam. Television spam. And now the most annoying type of spam of all: Phone spam.
And this isn't ordinary phone spam involving your average telemarketer. These are political ads. On automation. Basically someone feeds in a list of phone numbers to a computer program and the computer then goes out and dials every number on that list and plays the same message over and over again. If you don't hear the message in its entirety one time it will keep calling you until you do. And with the so-called national "do not call list" granting immunity to politicians, they can phone spam you a half-dozen times per day with the same (or different) message without any legal repercussions.
It takes 20 minutes of silence and focus for a programmer to get back into "the zone" after an interruption such as a phone ringing. Even if they aren't the one answering but are in earshot of the call, they are interrupted. If the phone rings once an hour every hour during business hours, that is a grand total of 2.7 hours of work time lost to the employer.
Know this: Some programmer had to write the code that is now performing these mass phone calls for politicians. I'd love to have the name and number of the person so we can have a little one-on-one chat about morals and how they don't have any to inflict this new trend onto us (and they are probably experiencing it as well). I'm trying to think of any useful purpose for this sort of technology and can't think of anything at all so I'm left with someone being contracted to develop it and nobody bothered to question what it would be used for.
I shall now return to my zone.
Spam seems to abound. There's e-mail spam. Snail mail spam. Fax spam. Television spam. And now the most annoying type of spam of all: Phone spam.
And this isn't ordinary phone spam involving your average telemarketer. These are political ads. On automation. Basically someone feeds in a list of phone numbers to a computer program and the computer then goes out and dials every number on that list and plays the same message over and over again. If you don't hear the message in its entirety one time it will keep calling you until you do. And with the so-called national "do not call list" granting immunity to politicians, they can phone spam you a half-dozen times per day with the same (or different) message without any legal repercussions.
It takes 20 minutes of silence and focus for a programmer to get back into "the zone" after an interruption such as a phone ringing. Even if they aren't the one answering but are in earshot of the call, they are interrupted. If the phone rings once an hour every hour during business hours, that is a grand total of 2.7 hours of work time lost to the employer.
Know this: Some programmer had to write the code that is now performing these mass phone calls for politicians. I'd love to have the name and number of the person so we can have a little one-on-one chat about morals and how they don't have any to inflict this new trend onto us (and they are probably experiencing it as well). I'm trying to think of any useful purpose for this sort of technology and can't think of anything at all so I'm left with someone being contracted to develop it and nobody bothered to question what it would be used for.
I shall now return to my zone.
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