At around 2am this morning someone called me. They let the phone ring a long time, and when I finally realized that the ringing sound wasn’t a mossy green elephant giving me instructions to build a bridge out of the new grape flavored licorice from here to Hawaii, and woke up, I was too late. They’d already hung up.
This morning I looked at who had called on the Caller ID, and it was a private caller. No one ever calls me at 2am, so my curiosity drove me to press *69, which calls the last person who called me. I’d get to the bottom of this.
Well, the phone rang, I heard a busy signal, and a cheery female robot voice said something like “We called the number, and it wasn’t busy at the time, but it’s now become busy. We’ll call you back with a special ring when it’s free.” OK, I was actually impressed that the robot was friendly enough to do this for me. So I waited. About 3 seconds later, the special ring! I picked it up, expecting to unviel and hopefully wake up my 2am caller, and I once again heard the same cheery message. The line was free, but was now busy, I’ll get a special ring when it’s free.
I think the line was free about 20 times, then busy. I was stuck in some crazy loop. At this point, I was tired of the phone ringing, and suspected that the person who called me last night was a robot telemarketer. Now, my robot friend was trying to do me a favor, but trying way to hard, driving me crazy. I’d ignore the special ring, but to no avail, my cheery robot friend would inform me that the line was free, but was now busy.
I still don’t know if it will stop. It seems to have sensed my discouragement, as it’s trying the line less often now, but just when I think I’m free of this over-achieving phone entity, it will send me the special ring.
The moral of the story: There are evil robots that are pure evil and make no efforts to disguise their evil core, and there are more evil robots, who disguise their evil core with cheery voices, helpful attitudes, and special rings.