Phone someone else's home, ET.

[mrissa]

Since I got home from Convivial we've had two calls to openly attempt to persuade us to vote for something or someone and two attempts to survey us. Since I didn't listen long enough to get to the questions, I can't say whether they were allegedly neutral polls or push polls. The first question was, "Will you tell me your name?", and my answer was a cheerful, "No thank you," and that stymied them, so then we were done.

I really don't much like the phone. Screening calls won't help, because we still have to deal with the noise and checking to see if it's someone we want to talk to, and one of the "private number unlisted" calls this week was someone whose number has shown up as listed before, with whom I wanted to talk. So it's a periodic annoyance, and I'm trying to be as cheerful and polite as I can with the people who are making these calls, because it's the only job some of them could get. And I feel like we're all a little on edge these days. So many people are coping with big difficult things, or with small things adding up to push on them the wrong way. And maybe it's just the people I know, but I don't think so. So it's worth being cheerful and polite to the people who interrupt my dinner, because who knows what they're going home to after. But on the other hand, there's no need for me to relax my boundaries, either. It's not a zero-sum game. Calm. Polite. Onwards.