Drabble by Kevin Fagan for May 16, 2022

May caller ID says “potential spam”.

She is so nice.

B ICH

Geez, Wendy, that’s cruel. You didn’t have to let him ruin his day (and credit) like that.

SPAM RISK The call must be from the Hormel Company.;D

Ugh, Wendy is so mean. Go back to Echo, Norm!

I don’t think the spammer is gonna get anything from him…

Even Wendy should know better than that.

This is low even for your standard, Wendy.

Why do you continue to hang around her, Norm?

Give Spam Risk her number and tell them she’s waiting for their call.

So the caller might send us food??

My phone will tell me a call is probably spam AFTER the caller has disconnected and the phone tells me I missed the call.

I’m sure he doesn’t want to renew his car repair warranty since he doesn’t have a car.

why do you go with her

OK, so Wendy is no longer a sympathetic character. I get that Norm gets on her nerves, but he means well, and he’s not mean to her, no matter how badly she treats him. Taking advantage of his naivete and exposing him to spam makes her a jerk.

There is telemarketing and then there is scam fraud. I tell them that they are being paid a commission to steal from people. Please try it. It makes it harder for them to keep workers and I am getting a lot fewer calls.

And his cousin Spam Likely. They are all so nice and polite. Not like the IRS and the Police and the Court who call of the time to tell me that they want me to pay with Crypto currency.

An old Steve Martin joke. On the ski lift he would turn to the person next to him and pretend to know him. He would call them by their first name as engraved on their skiis. “Rental”.

Wendy isn’t all bad. She is a classic control freak though. ZEN teaches us that we can only be controlled if we allow ourselves to be controlled. Norman should take up ZEN. Then he would always be his own master.

They ARE generally nice if they are not robots. You just don’t want to deal with them.

I’d only answer if it was Nuclear Beer Risk.

A frequent caller.

If the name isn’t in my caller i.d. list I don’t answer. If someone really needs/wants to talk to me they leave a message.

Another type of scam: I get requests on Messenger (never FB) from someone using the name of somebody I know requesting to be friended. I’ll test them by replying "Wow, d’ya remember those days back at “Roosevelt” high, class of ‘1998’?" They’ll almost always reply yes, and I’ll know they’re a scammer. Then I block them.

A couple of weeks ago, I was getting a patient ready for a hearing test and his phone rang. It clearly said “SPAM RISK”, but he said it was important and he had to take the call. I had to wait for him to answer and quickly hang up before I could start testing. Still, that wasn’t as bad as the guy who took out the insert earphones mid test to answer his phone.

I got one of those today. It was a video of a guy in a Prime uniform. Blocked and deleted it and below the video it said spam risk.

I despise those Spam risk calls. (Don’t answer them!)

If I ever get a call on my phone, I know 100% that’s it’s spam or someone who doesn’t know me because no one knows my number. I don’t even know it.

The apple didn’t fall very far from the tree

Windy Witchy Bitsky!