By Elliott Brack
Editor and Publisher, GwinnettForum
DEC. 1, 2020 | The telephone rang on a Sunday afternoon. A pleasant-sounding lady said she was calling about my house in Norcross, and gave our address.
My immediate question to her was direct: “Why are you calling about our house?”
“I’m just calling to see if you are interested in selling your house,” she said.
Yep, it was just another junk call, this one interrupting a Sunday.
My reply: “Ma’am, I’ve lived in this house since 1979. And I’m planning to live here until I die. When you read my obit, that’s when you should call about this house, and not until then.”
She may have hung up before I got in that last part.
But boy, do junk calls make me mad! And this year, they seem to have multiplied, what with some people wanting to know the views of many about the election. But, somehow, this topped any I’ve had lately and got to me.
We all know the polling firms had a bad year, at best a mixed result this year about the elections. We’ve been getting those political calls since early spring, or was it late Winter? And since then, I’ve adopted a new response.
I prevaricate. One day I’ll give what I think are Democratic responses. The next time a call comes, I’ll give what would best be Republican responses. I’ve even fabricated in an independent mode.
No doubt you have had similar calls. I wonder if I’m the only one giving out false responses. After so long, you just get tired of giving these people interrupting your life with their questions to make money on your thoughts. So why not make your responses downright false, so that in the long run, the polls will report inaccurate data. In this manner, their wrong presentations will predict inaccurate and unreliable information. Can this work to make the polling industry wrong many times, and therefore useless?
So that’s my tactic for them bothering me. It is my way to do my utmost to make polls unreliable. At least the pollsters aren’t passing on to their candidates anything which is valid from me. If enough of us do that, perhaps the guy who invented the polling industry, George Gallup, an alumnus of one of my alma maters, we’ll have the guy twirling in his grave.
Perhaps much of Gwinnett also gets these unsolicited offers all of the time by phone or in the mail to buy our homes. But somehow, the mail inquiries don’t not seem as intrusive as people phoning and interrupting your day wanting to know: “Can I buy your house.” Yep, it steamed me!
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- Have a comment? Send to: elliott@brack.net
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