Adventures in Telemarketing

Like anyone else of a sound mind, I hate telemarketers. Well, not the telemarketers themselves; just the whole industry process. Because inevitably, they'll call when I am:

1. getting out of the shower
2. getting in the shower
3. in the shower
4. eating dinner
5. eating snacks
6. on the way in the door
7. on the way out of the door

Well, you get the idea. I was reading about some ways to 'manage' the whole telemarketer experience with cleverness and guile and decided to give it a try. So here is the play-by-play of the call I got earlier in the week.

Him: "Hello, I'd like to speak to Michael J, please!"

Me: "Speaking."

Him: "Hello Mr. J., my name is Brent and I'm calling to follow up on the credit card offer we sent to you last week and want to just get some information from you so that we can activate it and get you going with using your new card right away. So let me just verify your mailing address to get started... I have your address as _______. Is that correct?"

Me: "Brent, thank you so much, but I'm not interested in getting any more credit cards at this time, but thanks for calling!"

Him: "Well Mr. J, you know that we provide a low 8.1% interest rate for the first year of the card and 0% on balance transfers for 6 months. It's a great deal that's only being offered to our preferred customers. So if you'll verify your mailing address for me; I have your address as _______. Is that correct?"

Me: "No, like I said, Brent, I'm not interested in any more credit cards. I have more than enough right now. Thanks anyway, though!"

Him: "Well, Michael.... may I call you "Michael"?"

Me: "No."

Him: "Oh, okay...Well Mr. J, you probably didn't realize that with our platinum MasterCard, you can..."

Me: (abruptly interrupting) "Wait a minute!! Leroy?! Is this you Leroy?!"

Him: "Uh... no..."

Me: "Yes it is!! Leroy, quit playin' man! I know dis' you!! What chu' doin' at home man? Aren't you supposed to meet with your parole officer today?"

Him: "Uh.. this is Brent from _____ bank... I wante..."

Me: (interrupting again) "Leroy you don't even SOUND like a banker man or nothing. You still coming over tonight? You gonna' bring the 40's with you???"

Him: (silence)

Me: "LEROY! Hello?? LEROY?!?"

Him: "Have a good afternoon, sir." (click)

Ahhh... I love telemarketers.

A Brief History of Iraq

My "little" brother is in the process of transitioning to a new location after spending more than 13 years in North Carolina. His new home will be in the D.C. area and fortunately, I'll be close enough to him to be able to visit whenever I want, and vice-versa. But this isn't about his new living conditions. This is about his profession and the impact it has on him, and others like him.

Flip ('short' for Philip) is a U.S. Marine. A hard-core marine. He has been in the corp for 18 years, and was promoted to the rank of Gunnery Sergeant faster than most enlisted personnel achieve the rank of sergeant. He served four tours of duty in his career; Desert Storm in the Gulf, Somalia, Afganistan, and he just returned from Iraq a little more than 5 months ago. Needless to say, we were all ecstatic that he was returned to us safely, particularly since we almost lost him after the Somalia conflict.

I have always been on one distinctly polarized position regarding the war in Iraq. And maybe that's a discussion for another blog entry. Bt one of the most significant challenges that I have with the conflict as it stands is the fact that it has been relegated to an assessment of numbers. Whether it's on the news or in the paper, we constantly hear of the number of troops who have lost their lives on any given day, and most unfortunately, every day. And we have become so numb to the news that it is sometimes almost as expected as the daily weather report. And I was the same way, until my baby brother was shipped out. Then, things took on a different meaning for me. I literally was dreading each time the phone rang during certain times of the day because although I knew that I felt I was prepared to less than the best news, I know that it would have been way too much for me to handle.

Fortunately, through the use of technology, we were able to maintain a connection with him, and shared some of his experiences via email and written notes. Probably most notable was the number of very young men who fought, and who sometimes gave their lives. Flip sent a picture of some of his men and the most striking thing was the fact that they all were so young! And regardless of my personal opinions about the conflict, things seemed to always come into perspective when I would look at the faces of the brave young men who on a daily, and hourly basis put their lives at risk. Beyond the ongoing danger to their lives, the conditions in which they lived were amazing. On a regular basis, RPGs were lobbed into the perimeter, and unless his men were on their toes on a regular basis, serious injury or death could have occurred; particularly since the sand allowed the grenades to operate in somewhat of a stealth mode. And during significant mortar attacks, they had the 'luxury' of taking cover in their state of the art 'bunkers' until the barrage ceased. There was sand on top of sand on top of sand, and eauipment, gear and personal items all became havens for renegrade particles of sand.

For the most part, most of their time was spent on patrol, and waiting for nothing much to happen. And that was one of the most challenging things for Flip. Leading so many young men created a need to have them stay aware and keep on their toes. Sometimes, the calm in-between the storm lent itself to letting their guard down, and therefore, the possibility of getting themselves into trouble.

One of the most exciting things for me, however, was the fact that there were famous personalities in Iraq. Do you remember "Sanford and Son"? Well he sent us the picture below and swore that he had found the "Bubba" of Iraq. I'm not sure that I totally disagree! What do you think?

More "Vighpyr" trivia

My "logo". This was a gift from a friend some time ago that's on the wall in my office. It's an ink drawing made of little dolphins and fish and pandas... Cute, huh?

"Vighpyr", revealed!!

vighpyr [vahy-per] - n

A unique spelling for the pseudonym used by this blogger all over the Internet.

Here's the explanation. I've had numerous pseudonyms in my techie life. My first was when I ran a bulletin board system many moons ago. At that time, I went by the nick, "Silver Shadow". That one, I actually stole from a student who used to play a lot of rpg (role-playing games). It wasn't copyrighted or anything like that so there was no guilt. Some time after that when I became addicted to the game "Quake", I used the name "Shadow Assassin". That was pretty cool because I kept "Shadow" which I thought was neat, and of course, since the main focus of Quake was to run around like crazy just chopping and hacking and slashing and otherwise blowing people up, the moniker "Assassin" seemed appropriate. But when I 'grew up', I decided that I wanted to have a more 'sophisticated' name.

When I was on the AVP circuit for a bit less than 9 years, I was called "Viper" because I was fast and was very quick off the sand at the net. Also, one of my favorite movies, "Top Gun" features one of my favorite actors, Tom Skerritt. And his callsign in the movie was "Viper". Since the normal spelling was practically on every site on the net and I could never get that name, I developed this spelling that apparently, isn't anywhere else on the net. But if you do a Google Search of it, you'll see my electronic footprints all over the place. Every occurrence that you see is somewhere I've been. So that's the origin (and the pronunciation) of "Vighpyr".

"The Spot" (A little piece of serenity)

'Nuff said.

Time has been kind...

Over the weekend, I carved out some time to go through a couple of storage containers so that I could finally get rid of a bunch of stuff that had been long ago relegated to "pack rat" status. And even though I don't like throwing things away until they either turn to dust, or I see them listed on the Attorney General's list of potentially toxic waste products, I figured that this was a good time to divert from that normal path. Generally, I try to keep things in order, but that normally means that somewhere, there's a pile of shit that I've stowed out of sight, and out of mind.

So I pulled out the container and started diggin through it. Wow. Cool. A picture frame with some other guy in it. If I was more in touch with my feminine side, he might be attractive. Otherwise, he's just a face in a frame that I didn't put there. I'll keep the frame. Dude's gotta' go. And here's a bag of black plastic checker pieces. Why black pieces? Where are the red ones? Where's the board? Why in the hell would I want to save black checker pieces? Trash. And what do we have here??? A photo album... Okay, let's see what we have here... I opened the album and could tell it was really old. It was one of those photo albums with the clear plastic covers that got yellow and brittle over time and stuck to the pages like some type of ancient super glue after a few years of being tucked away in the far reaches of storage land. So I opened it and saw that it was a bunch of pictures of me from way back in the day. Waaaay back in the day. They were the kinds of pictures where I was too old for mom to be dressing me and therefore, not young enough to blame the fashion on her.

The first couple of pages were cute; baby pics (damn, I was cute!) and a few pre-pre-pubescent shots in which one could just look at my face and tell that the only care that I had in the world was whether the coyote was actually going to catch the roadrunner the next time it came on T.V. But then I turned the page and there it was. My picture. circa, 1978. I was standing there, as cool as cool could ever be. I'm wearing a rust-colored three-piece suit. Somewhere tucked under there was a silk, big-print shirt. I knew that because the big-ass dumbo-ears-like collar was prominantly displayed above the lapel of the vest. I was wearing platform shoes at least 3 inches tall and I must not have been quite steady on them since I was copping this wicked gansta' lean on a big speaker by the door that MUST have been because I was feeling unsteady on the big shoes because there's no WAY I thought I was that cool! And the piece de resistance; a medium-height, but neatly trimmed afro that was connected to a set of sideburns which eventually formed a perfectly positioned mustache. In the picture, I could only imagine that the crucifix that my mom fastented to the wall by the door served not only to bless the entrance to our home, but I'm sure it also had to be a conduit via which she prayed that I would grow out of this stage in my fashion life. See below? First person to laugh gets kicked out of the blog!

Time to bring my baby out...

Well summer's here and it's time to take my baby from under wraps and get her ready for the open highway. Well, maybe not the open highway. Her days of zipping around at 85+MPH are long gone. But for zipping around the city or cruising on the open highway, she's still more than capable. She has 248,000 miles on her and still purrs like a kitten. It was somewhat of a difficult winter, however. She spent more than a little time covered in snow and ice when i removed the cover to replace a pretty bad rip.

I think that it was more than a month before the weather 'warmed' up enough for me to get the bottom layer of ice off so that I could replace the cover. You can see what kind of shape she was in below. Ouch! You can see how the snow and ice was in the pic below. The bad part is that the layer of "snow" on the car is actually a layer of ice. So it took me a little while to get the ice off without damaging the body even after the temperature rose a bit. But for the most part, she came out of it unscathed. This wasn't the ideal snow story for her...

...that would be the picture below. Doesn't it look like she's just having a good time? Now, the reason I refer to the car as "she" and "her" is because this was one of the models that has the female voice which tells you of critical conditions like low fuel level, open doors, lights left on and keys left in the ignition to name a few. So I've always referred to her as "her". And she'll be 22 years old in September!

So next week I'll be taking her to get the exterior done and after that, I-95 here I come!