It has been an amazingly busy week. At work, we are down a couple of people which is really hard on the rest of the team as it is up to them to pick up the slack. When you are part of a small team, it is very noticeable when there are people missing. for instance, because of my regular work, I generally only help out with calls when it gets busy. The majority of my work is done off the phones. So in a typical day I will log between 10 and 15 calls max. Yesterday I did 35. Unfortunately with all of the calls my regular work is suffering a little bit.
There is still however some really funny stuff that happens once in a while.
This morning, I open up my laptop to check what the weather is supposed to be like, and I quickly realise that I have forgotten to turn off msn messenger.
There is a friend request from some random person, so I accept it and begin to talk with them… you know it is a bad sign when they start the conversation with “A/S/L?” or other decade old chat lingo.
I was not surprised to find out that it was a chat bot promoting an adult site. I was however somewhat surprised that we are half way through 2008 and they are still using that tactic.
I remember back in the 90’s there was a lot of that sort of activity. People were also a lot less net savvy then though. The people they are targeting with these chat bots are the type of people that grew up with computers. The 20-30 something crowd. I would like to think that most of us are smart enough to recognize a bot when we see one.
Though, if they are targeting someone who is online at 6AM (which would be in the range of like 5AM to 9AM for most of north america) you would think it is a fairly good bet that it is someone who is checking the news or weather before heading in to the office. After all, if there isn’t an acutal need to be up at 6am… who the hell else is awake?
I can’t say that they are better or worse than Telemarketers, but at least I know a pretty good defence against them. The block button works wonders.
It would be nice if these msn-marketers were required to be real people, actually having to type in the scripts and promote the site in the context of the conversations that are being had. Any of us that have been on the internet for any length of time could come up with hundreds of creative ways to make that fun.
On that note, time to go to work and pretend to be productive for a while. Or at least pretend to enjoy my job more than I do.
