Tag Archives: aggression

We’re from AT&T, We Don’t Know The Word, “Stop”

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I wrote this letter as a reply to the fifth or sixth sales representative with AT&T. They are attempting to sell us fiber optic data services. I directed them to our Telecom MSP as a professional courtesy, as I do to all sales folk who directly appeal to us. It’s just good business practice, the MSP exists to handle the complexities of telecommunications for us.

Hello,

You’ll be the fifth AT&T sales associate that I have written this to, so here goes… Please direct all sales inquiries for the COMPANY domain to MSP. Person 1 and Person 2 have been CC’ed to this email. Please feel free to share this detail with any other AT&T sales associates who might want to contact us, or not, as we are just forwarding all of this to our Tcom MSP. 

We are now considering AT&T to be harassing us, but since your company doesn’t seem to understand cease and desist, we’ll just keep on sending all of you to our MSP. I would ask to be taken off the list and to “Please Stop”, but AT&T isn’t interested in stop. Perhaps AT&T doesn’t have a clear definition of the word stop.

Here… here’s the definition of stop:

stop |stäp| 

verb (stops, stopping, stopped) 

1 [ no obj. ] (of an event, action, or process) come to an end; cease to happen:his laughter stopped as quickly as it had begun | the rain had stopped and the clouds had cleared.

• [ with present participle ] cease to perform a specified action or have a specified experience: she stopped giggling | [ with obj. ] :  he stopped work for tea.

• [ with present participle ] abandon a specified practice or habit: I’ve stopped eating meat.

• stop moving or operating: he stopped to look at the view | my watch has stopped.

• (of a bus or train) call at a designated place to pick up or let off passengers: main-line trains stop at platform 7.

• Brit. informal stay somewhere for a short time: you’ll have to stop the night.

2 [ with obj. ] cause (an action, process, or event) to come to an end: this harassment has got to be stopped.

• prevent (an action or event) from happening: a security guard was killed trying to stop a raid.

• prevent or dissuade (someone) from continuing in an activity or achieving an aim: a campaign is under way to stop the bombers.

• prevent (someone or something) from performing a specified action or undergoing a specified experience: you can’t stopme fromgetting what I want.

• cause or order to cease moving or operating: he stopped his car by the house |police were given powers to stop and search suspects.

• informal be hit by (a bullet).

• instruct a bank to withhold payment on (a check).

• refuse to supply as usual; withhold or deduct: the union has threatened to stop the supply of minerals.

• Boxing defeat (an opponent) by a knockout: he was stopped in the sixth by Tyson

ORIGIN Old English (for)stoppian‘block up (an aperture)’; related to German stopfen, from late Latin stuppare ‘to stuff.’

Please Stop. 

Please Go Away.

No, We do not want any. Even if we did, we don’t anymore.

Thanks

We’ll keep getting helpful AT&T sales reps until I create a spam filter for the att.net domain and route everything to the trash, which really, I should do out of professional courtesy to AT&T. If it wasn’t for the fact that they at some point could email me about repairs, that would be something I could seriously consider. Alas, I may have to just start ignoring them with my delete key.

Unless they … stop… HA! HA! HA! They don’t know the word, “Stop.”

Answering War

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Many things occur to me out of the blue when I least expect them to strike. It’s as if a part of me has been working on a problem, chewing on it, and when it reached a solution it gathers up all its paperwork and knocks on the front of my brain and says “Here, we’ve done all we can do, frontal lobe, here’s this for your consideration.” And I stand there in the middle of something really mundane and I’m stuck. I stop moving and much like when you open your door and find a brightly colored box with a bow on top, you spend all that time forgetting about what you were doing and stand in shock at the box. So it was with me earlier this evening.

Apparently a part of me was working on military strategy. Turns out part of the paperwork also included a method to cause a cease of conflict and effectively short-circuit a war, going from conflict, skipping over death, and moving to resolution. How you ask? I  was myself shocked at the answer and it comes from mother nature herself.

If you grow a very large amount of Cannabis Sativa, dry it out thoroughly and then set it on fire, then blow the resultant smoke out onto the battlefield, saturating every square inch with a thick white fog in about 15 minutes time all combatants will spontaneously stop giving a damn about whatever it is that they were fighting about and put down their weapons and sit down on the ground, some may lay down, others will likely lean back on their elbows. The key here is that every combatant will stop caring about killing and just want to “hang out” and “take in the majesty of this place, maaaaan” some may fall asleep and the rest will be overcome with feelings of euphoria, laziness, and extreme hunger.

Then, once you’ve smoked both sides until they have stopped fighting, you roll in hot dog carts, pizza carts, falafel carts, whatever. They go ding-ding-ing onto the battlefield and since everything is free (it’s war, this is what you pay for…) everyone is calm, feeling just fine thank-you-very-much, and the idea of getting a gun and killing someone else is about as far from anyones mind as humanly possible. You’ve just eaten five pounds of whatever and really all you want to do is take a nap.

Those that might be wearing gas masks will see the beatific joy and happiness on their fellow combatants faces and perhaps they’ll be encouraged to take off their masks. If not, then you still have to contend with an angry army, however if you continuously smoke them eventually any gas mask will saturate and stop working and people have to breathe. Over time, those that hold out with masks will just stop caring and get hungry like all the others.

This method would work perfectly for a peacekeeping force between two belligerent sides, so, for example, Americans versus Iranians – the United Nations peacekeepers cultivate millions of tons of dried cannabis sativa and start working on a smoker-gun and then we drop them into the middle of the battlefield and they just sit back with a beer in their hands, on a folding chair, making sure the machine chuffs out smoke nice and evenly. It doesn’t matter what your religion is, what you are fighting about, or anything. Once exposed to this smoke, nature will take its course. The course is not war, killing, or death – but rather just relaxing, taking in the sights, and wondering where the nearest falafel cart is.

I dare anyone to challenge this idea.