Wow. I Won a Cruise. Yippee.

Today (OK, yesterday) was not particularly different from most days.  I received four calls on my cell phone by midday.  Three of them were from phone numbers in Arlington, Virginia, where I know plenty of people.  However, none of the calls was from any of those people, including the one call from when I was waiting in a doctor's office.

Then, a few minutes before sitting down to write this, I received one from Hamilton, Massachusetts, where I'm pretty sure that I know no one, even though I went to college in the Commonwealth.  OK, I just looked it up.  I don't know anyone there, or in South Hamilton either.

Incredibly, though, it was the same perky Sally calling, now from Hamilton, even though all the phone numbers calling were different.  Who would have guessed?  The message?  I had won a cruise to ... oh, somewhere; I can't really recall where as I waited for the option to delete my number from their list.

Of course, I would have thought that there is a finite number of entities intent on giving me a cruise, and so would you.  That's why it is a bit surprising that after selecting "delete me" on any number of such calls, I still get 3-4 or so every day.  That's a lot of people determined to give me a cruise to ... well, I guess I should have listened to see where.

What do you think they wanted?  I mean, no one makes money if you just give something away, right?  So maybe they wanted to make me go and enjoy the cruise so much that I'd want to keep cruising, and then be willing to pay for all the subsequent ones.  Must have been the cruise line.  Yeah, that's it.

Maybe they wanted to get me on a cruise where I was a captive audience, and then harangue me until I bought a magazine subscription, or a year's supply of White Cloverine Salve, or maybe two years' worth.  Maybe I actually did win some contest that I never entered, for which the prize was a cruise, and they felt that the best way to tell me was not an email, but to have a perky recorded voice call my cell while I was sitting in a doctor's office.

God as my witness, as I just wrote the above paragraph, I got a call from an electronic voice calling from Big Bear Lake, California, offering to fix my "credit card issues", even though I have only one credit card, and it has no balance and I don't use it. I don't know what "issues" they appear to have detected, or how (that's the scary part), but I selected the "never call me again" option.

Sure, that ought to do it.

I wonder where that cruise sails from.  We don't live anywhere near a cruise port (do they call people with, say, Kansas or Utah area codes to offer a cruise?).  Do you think that part of winning a cruise is a free round trip flight from Salt Lake City to and from Miami, or LA or New York?  I kind of don't think so.

So I need to tell them all something, apart from "Please stop calling."  I don't cruise.  Cruising involves big boats, and going out on the waves.  Waves mean "oceans", and "oceans" means "seasickness."

Seasickness is not a pleasant thing.  Just ask the poor cameraman or producer (I forget which) a few years back who went out on his first sail with a Bering Sea crab boat for the "Deadliest Catch" show that you know you also watch.  The guy was so severely seasick that he dehydrated massively and had to be returned to port -- not a decision the captain, with crab to catch, was too thrilled with, although in fairness he was very sympathetic to the guy dying on his boat.

So I don't want a cruise.  I would not enter a contest whose first prize was a cruise.  I don't have time for a cruise, even if I paid for it myself or it was a real, up-and-up award of a cruise with no ulterior motive.  And that's before how much I hate calls from non-human voices.

Here's my solution.  Hire those robo-call types and have them start calling suspected ISIS sympathizers and offering them a free cruise.  Get them all on a ship headed for the middle of the ocean, and then just stop, sort of like police departments get fugitives to come in to a fake event and then arrest them.  Except in this case the ship could just, you know, sink.

You think ISIS guys like boat trips?

Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
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