Robcalls must work, otherwise why would I get five to ten a day? Billions of them were made this year in this country alone: police departments asking for money, candidates wanting support, insurance scammers looking to sell bogus policies, roofing scammers wanting to get on top of your roof after a five-minute drizzle and prove to you that a new one is imperative. I even get calls wanting to buy my house for cash, at half price, or increase the warranty on my truck that expired seven years ago. Still, these are easy to handle: all you do is hang up, or laugh and hang up, or is some cases, call them back, cuss them out and waste their time, just for spite. On the rare occasions I get to speak to a human, I ask how much they charge to never call again.
The mistakes that are not so easy to handle, however, are the ones I talk about in this essay. These are the ones where grocery stores, your bank, the restaurant you just left, make mistakes and those are always in their favor. If you catch them, they claim an error was made and happily return your money, all the while making a rueful face, claiming, after all, that to err is human.
Yes, to err is human, but greed is more human and if you multiply the “random” blunder by millions, also highly profitable.
Link to the pages of the Denton Record Chronicle.