Saturday, April 03, 2004

NEVER call a college student before noon on the weekends.

Ya know, I'm usually pretty easy-going. My typical life philosophy is, if you're not hurting anyone else, do what you want. Freedom of speech, freedom of choice, freedom of religion, all that and more. That said... Jehovah's Witnesses suck.

I got woken up this morning at about 9:30. Normally not a problem. But it's Saturday and I didn't actually go to bed till about 3 AM. So right there, I'm pissed off. Picked up the phone, glanced at the caller ID: Kingdom Hall. Now, in my more lucid moments I would have immediately recognized the significance of that and probably just let the phone continue ringing. However, as I had only recently returned to the waking world, I was confused and the only thing I could think of was either another dorm I hadn't heard of (?) or that Kingdom Hospital show, which also made no sense. So I answered the phone in my best possible "No, no... you didn't just wake me up." voice. I'll spare you the gory details... but Psalm 37 was mentioned. In any case, I noticed a couple very interesting things about this phone call:

1. Within the first fifteen seconds, the lady mentioned that the Bible promised "an end to terrorism". Now, personally, that word is no longer one of my panic buttons. Nor has it been since about two months after 9-11. But provoking fear and offering a neat, tidy little answer all in one phrase might be pretty effective on some people.

2. Through the whole call, the nice, pleasant-sounding lady on the other end NEVER ONCE mentioned that she was calling on behalf of the Jehovah's Witnesses. If I didn't have caller ID, I would probably not know what the hell was going on. I'm gonna go out on a limb here and guess that they're trying the "voice of God wake-up call" tactic. The lady needs a deeper voice if she's gonna try and pretend to be God. This also makes me think that they're gonna call back eventually. I'm not answering.

Oh, one other thing... I noticed that after I hung up, the first couple of words out of my mouth were "fuckin' hell!" (My usual reaction at being woken up after only six hours of sleep.) Somehow I don't think that was what the nice lady was shooting for.

Well, now that I'm up... I really wanna go back to sleep again. But my fuckin neighbors are also up, playing their music... which has apparently been going all night (even when I went to bed, I'm not sure how I was able to sleep). It's gonna be a long day.

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