Magical Thinking - Augusten Burroughs [53]
I am astonished by the people who come to the podium to remember Mark the Shrink. They are doctors, artists, friends from the South, a few patients. I had no idea how large his life was.
He kept this to himself. It was his secret.
TELEMARKETING REVENGE
L
ately, I am receiving numerous calls each night from telemarketers. They’re calling with the frequent urgency of dumped boyfriends. At this point, I cannot help but wonder, is the entire telemarketing industry one big, jilted, clingy gay guy? They call to offer tremendous discounts on long-distance service, convenient debt consolidation, or simply to inform me that I have won a powerboat.
I can always tell a telemarketer before they even say a word. The phone rings and I answer. Immediately, I hear this pause and commotion in the background, like the person is calling from the cosmetics floor at Saks. Then they stumble through the beginning of their canned greeting: “Good evening, Mr. Burr—” Always, they are unable to pronounce my incredibly esoteric name: Burroughs. Two of the most primitive syllables combined into one word. And yet it always seems to come out as “Bee-rows, Burg-hose, or Burrouch.”
Singularly, these calls are annoying. But when they happen four, five, and six times a night, my annoyance is transformed into something more nefarious. By law, saying “Please remove me from your calling list” is supposed to stop these people from calling you. There’s an actual law in New York that says so. A “go away telemarketer” law. But does it work? Of course not. If anything, it strengthens their resolve. The same banks continue to call me. Not a day goes by that some phone company doesn’t harass me. And if I win another fucking speedboat, I will be able to sell the lot of them and build a mansion on the waterfront land in Florida, which I allegedly won a week and a half ago.
So I decided to try an experiment. To seek a sort of curious revenge.
Last Thursday, a call came through, just like every other. I answered the phone, there was that malevolent pause filled with background sounds, then the obligatory mispronunciation of my name. Only instead of hanging up on the guy—it was a man this time; often it is a woman—I said, “Oh, wait. Who is this?”
He repeated the name of the company he was calling for. It was a credit card company.
I said, “Gee. You know what? I am kind of interested to hear this, but the thing is, I have my grandmother on the other line.”
“Okay, well then I can try you again—”
He was about to let me off the hook, but I cut him off. “But I really want to hear about this deal. I am interested. The thing is, I need a MasterCard that works harder for me. And I’m just about to hang up with my grandmother, so is there any way, you know, I can call you back?”
There was a pause. And I did not want him to become suspicious. I played Regular Guy. “Like, do you have some weird number or extension or whatever, so if I call you back I can ask for you, and you can just run through the deal real quick?”
I must have concealed my dubious intentions well enough because he said, “Sure. My name’s Paul. You can just dial 1-800-555-6575 and ask for extension 14.”
I said, “Great. Thanks, Paul. I appreciate it. I’ll get right back to you, man.”
“Great,” he said. “Talk to you soon.”
I hung up the phone and smiled. I went to the kitchen and removed an icy Blenheim ginger ale from the refrigerator and brought it back to the dining-room table. I did a quick little excited dance in place, and then I picked up the phone and returned Paul’s call.
“This is Paul,” he said, this time sounding more like a normal employee at a desk, as opposed to a telemarketer. I realized he was not accustomed to receiving calls from potential telemarketing victims and was thus less feral, more humanistic.
“Hey