The first call came in sixty seconds after I hit the submit button. I laughed to myself, “wow that was quick”. Thirty seconds later, another call. And then another. “Oh crap, that can’t be real” I thought. More calls came in. I couldn’t hit the block button fast enough. As the old Talking Heads lyric says, “…and you may ask yourself, well how did I get here?”

One fine morning I decided to investigate health insurance options. I was curious what the going rate would be if we were to go on the dreaded exchange – the ACA, Affordable Care Act, which is decidedly not affordable. One of the worst disasters for our health care system ever. But that’s a story for another day. So there I was, trusty internet browser at the ready. I entered in the name of my state and “health insurance exchange”. The very first entry looked like an official state exchange website, so I clicked on it.

Now, I’m usually pretty good at identifying scams, phishing, and other ne’er-do-well type of people on the interwebs trying to take advantage of unsuspecting senior citizens. I must have been off my game because nothing jumped out at me as a warning sign. An official looking form wanted a name, zip code, and phone number before it would show you the available plans in your area. Normally I’d enter bogus info in, but clearly I was asleep at the switch and entered my real phone number. As I said in the first paragraph, the moment I hit submit I started getting phone calls.

I didn’t get just a few phone calls – in less than 48 hours I’ve received over 80 telemarking calls.

The calls start exactly at 7am each morning. They continue, roughly one every 15 minutes or so all day long, ending at 5:30pm. They’re mostly from different numbers so it’s impossible to block them all.

I went back and looked at the web site I’d been on. Upon closer examination it’s an insurance broker. I searched all around the site and found a contact page with an email address. I fired off a spicy worded email demanding I be removed from their list. The mail bounced back with the message “the recipient’s mailbox is unavailable”. Of course.

These people are scum. They are truly evil. What kind of soulless ghoul do you have to be to intentionally design a system that misleads people and then bombards them with phone calls every 15 minutes? From the marketing people, to the project managers, down to the software engineers who coded it – fucking evil people. How do you go home and sleep after working on a system like that? Do they really look in the mirror and think they’re doing something that adds value to society? The answer is no they don’t, and they don’t care. It’s a paycheck. Not their problem that it might impact people negatively.

In a just world we would track down every employee’s address and park loud sirens outside their homes and let them blare away all night long. And for the executives at that company? Tar and feathers. A highly underrated form of mob justice from the medieval days, that carried over to the American Revolution. A mostly non permanent way of identifying someone as an absolute piece of shit human who should be avoided at all costs and probably run out of town.

Although not ideal, we’d probably be better off as a society if we brought back some good ol’ fashioned frontier justice. Protesters who block freeways? A good ass whipping by an angry mob would cure that pretty quick. Environmental protesters who deface art? Tar and feathers. Lawyers and politicians? Well, I’ll let you use your imagination.

By society becoming “more” civilized, I’d argue we’ve become uncivilized. There’s little concept of manners and decent behavior anymore. People don’t care because there are no consequences for their behavior.

As I sit here fuming at the calls that continue to come in, I’ll leave you with a quote from the pulp fiction author, and creator of Conan the Barbarian, Robert E. Howard:

“Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing.”