Perhaps inevitably after spam email was unleashed on what had been a world of tech innocence, modern telecommunications gave us something else. ROBOCALLS. Digital technology and falling telephony prices came together for scam artists out to trick the unsuspecting person who will answer a ringing phone because, Who knows? It could be someone they know.
Usually the ROBOCALL is an alarming pre-recorded message: Your Amazon account has been charged for $297. If this is inaccurate, please press "1." And then you're connected to a live fraudster.
Or alternatively, you answer the ROBOCALL and possibly give your name, and after several seconds of dead silence, you'll hear a weak Hello in an undeniably foreign accent. Self-preservation demands you hang up immediately, natch.
The problem with ROBOCALLS is they're getting more frequent. Like spam, the cost per call has to approach zero, I'm sure.
ROBOCALLS are not only increasing, but a nuisance of the first order. Can you imagine trying to run a restaurant on a take-out basis during the pandemic and every other call is a ROBOCALL that wastes your time and breaks the flow of what you're trying to do? It's a crime and ROBOCALLERS know that. (But what is the legal jurisdiction?)
The other day, working from home as I do, I was trying to get something done. After a while, I started on hash marks for the ROBOCALLS. By 10:30 a.m., I had seven. Insane.
What to do?
Since I decided to do something, I've enjoyed days of telephone silence, interrupted only by callers I know.
The solution? In an acronym, SIT--or Special Information Tone. It goes something like, dah, doh, dee. Three rising tones that indicate a call has failed. The SIT is an internationally recognized Call Progress Tone that tells the ROBOCALLER it's barked up the wrong tree.
It takes only a few clicks to download an SIT file off the Internet. Then I took the audio file and trimmed it with Audacity (any similar audio file editor will do), removing the explanation, "You have reached a number that has been disconnected, blah, blah, blah," so that I had a nice compact audio file of the three tones--dah, doh, dee--as a preamble to my outgoing answering machine message.
Anyone legit calling me gets my answering machine, with this oddest of ringtones, but my answer machine, screening calls, is teaching those ROBOCALLERS, The number is bad, the number is bad. It's sweet revenge. Sometimes you can use technology to help purge its bad behaviors. So ROBOCALL meet ROBOKILL, and take that SIT!
Image credit: author
Read Charlie Dickinson's story collection The Cat at Light's End, as an ebook in these downloadable formats:
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