Tuesday, June 26, 2018

The Curse of the Scam Caller

I haven't had a scam call for a while. Plenty of silent ones, where, when you pick up there is nothing there at all, but today a genuine attempt was made to penetrate the defences of the Ramblings system. The caller was from "the technical support of Windows" and he was really terribly worried about some problem on my computer (he read his script so fast I couldn't follow all of it). I asked him if he covered all versions of Windows. He said he did. I said that was good because I was running Windows 2 on an Amstrad 256PC. He wondered how I was able to connect to the Internet at all (Quite well informed by the usual standards of these people). I said it worked just fine. He called me a liar. I politely informed him that that was precisely my opinion about him and the conversation was terminated.

Thus far, nothing exceptional. But a few moments later my internet connection went down. Funny, I thought. It came back. Then it went down again. And came back. After a couple more interruptions it seems to be back to normal.

Pure coincidence, of course. Yet a little bit unsettling. Was my friend managing to emit some sort of vibration that interfered with the digital signal on the telephone line? Was he, and perhaps a few of his colleagues with nothing else to do, crouched over a little effigy of your correspondent, sticking pins in and chanting weirdly in an ancient tongue? Or did he shrug, cross my name off the list and go on to the next victim?

If you have had a strange experience immediately after disappointing a scam caller, do please let us know at the usual address.

No comments:

Post a Comment