Encoding Curses

Yes, I am not a robot.

I do not like people I don't know calling me on the telephone and telling me some kind of bull$#!+. If I am feeling charitable I simply hang up. If not, I reach into the gutter and pull up some kind of garbage and spew it into their ear. The later is worse than useless as it is unlikely to change the situation and subjects the caller to verbal abuse. If the caller was the instigator that would be fair, but usually that is not the case. Usually they are working for someone else who has somehow managed to find a way to make money badgering people.

It must work, right? They make a thousand phone calls a day, 50% of them don't connect because the numbers have been abandoned or the phone is off or something. Half of those that connect don't answer, and half of those that answer hang up immediately. So right off, just using wild-@$$ guesses for numbers, we have over a hundred people who will talk to the caller. Now in ten days, one caller might actually talk to a thousand people, and out of that thousand they might get one person who actually signs up for some kind of bull$#!+ that will cost them $10 a month.

How much is a perpetual agreement to pay $10 a month worth? A thousand dollars? That would take ten years to pay off. I'm thinking it might be worth $100. Some people will cancel immediately, some will cancel after a few months, some will keep it until they change credit cards or phone numbers or something so they might keep it for a year. A very few will keep it longer than that and that's where you make your money. If you were in the business I would expect you would know exactly what the percentages were for each of these situations, but I'm not so we're stuck using 50% for everything.

So if you are paying your operators a dollar a day, and it takes them ten days to make a sale that puts $100 in your pocket, you just made $90. I think English speakers in India are getting more like a dollar an hour, which would make the margins a little thin. Then there are those in the US for whom any money is better than nothing and they are willing to work for promises of commission. To me, it sounds like a horrible job but I imagine there are people who are suited for it. Hard to imagine, but I suppose it's possible that there are people who actually enjoy it.

What I really want to know is why no one has put a spike button on the telephone keypad? A button that would spike the caller and prevent them from ever making any more telephone calls. You know the telecom companies could do it, but if you ask why they'll give you some kind of bull$#!+ about how they can't keep track of who is making those robo-calls. But you know they d@mn well do know who is making those calls, and they probably give them preferential treatment because they are paying their bills.

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The original version of this post contained a bunch of curse words spelled out using punctuation symbols from the numeric keys on the keyboard (like you see in the @#$%^&* comics). I got to looking at that and I started wondering if that set of keys is large enough to encode all the letters in all of our popular curse words. Turns out no, the number keys only give you ten symbols and my list of popular curse words contains 16 letters. There are three other keys in the number row of the keyboard that each contain two characters, so you could do it, but then you still have to figure out how to assign the letters.

Looking at the ASCII code for those characters shows me that most of them differ from the letters of the alphabet by 0x20 (20 hex = 32 decimal), so we would have an easy correspondence for the first ten letters of the alphabet. But not all of those first ten letters are on our list.

Anyway, I thought maybe a spread sheet could help me find a solution, but the first thing I wanted was to do some hexadecimal arithmetic, so I ask for help and it points me to an article on the help forum, an article that I wrote about eight years ago.

Okay, that's enough of that.