A very Zorro evening

We watched Zorro re-runs this evening, while I made albondigas soup, a specialty of Victoria Escalante (Zorro's/Diego's beloved). It turned out predictably, I liked it, and Linda thought it was too spicy. Still it was fun. It left me a bit too tired to put up with Ellie's whining but she'll live.

What to say to those people on the phone

I got a very unexpected call this evening. It was apparently from the company hosting an opinion web site devoted to survey research. I don't usually get too many junk calls these days, although I suppose you could classify this as a survey call of sorts.

On about the third sentence of the script, they asked for an email address. Now there's no way that I'm giving my email out to some random person who calls. I get plenty enough junk mail as it is. So instead, I asked carefully who the company was. She listed the website for me. After I was sure I had it, I told her in a grave I-think-you've-really-messed-up kind of tone that I'm on the national do-not-call registry and I don't have a business relationship with them. I think they are not supposed to call me and they should add me to their own do-not-call list and not call me again.

I think I unnerved her, but she politely agreed to comply and ended the call. Whether it was actually illegal for her to call in the first place is hard to say; my brother Dean knows all of the loopholes. I get other surveys, so they'd probably argue that angle, but the truth is that they were promoting their web site business.