I had the stupidest gosh-darned nightmare in the entire cosmos Friday morning. I was in a vast house, or hall, or keep; I lived there. There were many servants. Many floors. On a lower floor, there was a telephone, an older one, corded, white but smudged by the greasy paw of Time. There was also a little Caller ID box. This Caller ID box did not, however, actually identify callers. Instead, it told you who the caller had been calling. I happened to be downstairs, and checked this phone, and found a truly inordinate number of calls on it, all directed to one of my servants, the downstairs maid. I checked the messages; they were all telemarketers. They were all the same message, an automated sales call of some sort. I deleted them, and blocked anyone from calling the downstairs maid again; no servant was getting a free ride off of my telephone. But then more calls started to come in, to another servant, all the same message; I tried to delete them, and blocked that name, too. I looked away for just a moment, and suddenly there were fifty new calls, to different servants, and my voicemail was completely full of these mechanical messages. I tried blocking and blocking and blocking, but I couldn't make them stop. I began to panic. My heart pounded. The calls kept coming. I tried to switch the phone off; I tried to unplug it; I pulled it off the table, and smashed it, and ripped huge handfuls of colour-coded wiring from it, but it kept ringing and ringing and ringing with these calls, these automated sales calls...
Nothing could make the telemarketers stop.
I woke up on my side, shaking, my hands clenched into fists, emitting tiny half-paralysed moans of terror.
Then I realised that this had been the fucking lamest nightmare in the history of fucking lame, and also that we have the National Do Not Call Registry now.
Normally I have a lot of respect for my subconscious and all the wonderful things it does for me, but this time...I feel really let down.
Posted by aloysius at October 24, 2003 11:40 PM | TrackBack |