Phone Games
Thinking of designing a fun game for those poor bastards who are forced to ignore the Do Not Call List and ring my home informing me that they’ll be “in my neighborhood giving home improvement estimates”. 8 – 10 times per week… no kidding.
I’m imagining a cool phone tree (phone maze, really) that anyone who is not on my whitelist goes through when attempting to cause my phone to ring. A couple of simple options can get you to my voicemail if you’re paying attention but if you want to cause my phone to actually ring, you’d need to go through an intensive identification system that verifies a human is pulling the triggers and that he actually has valid business with me. Oh yes, there’ll be plenty of recursion with some options being infinite.
It must seem odd that I’d devise such a thing given my distaste for phone mazes from the likes of Verizon, Time Warner, the DMV, etc., but those are silly vendors thinking they’re doing their customers a favor by having them as customers. I’d simply be disenfranchising those who want to extract money or time or both from me for their own gain (pssst, if you’re calling to give me money, lmk and I’ll whitelist you).
I’m not actually going to do it of course. But there could be a business model in there. Perhaps rather than we being sold on a mailing/calling list we sell an access code to a distributor and get paid for each inbound call. Nuke the access code when you’re not seeing enough of a return or whatever. That’s a free (probably already done) business idea… lmk when it’s done.