I finally took the ringer off our landline phone. No one has our number because we use it only to make outgoing calls anyway, and mostly for deliveries. For the past year PLDT Sales has been pestering us everyday with their desperate attempts to make me avail of useless services designed to increase our monthly bill by P200 or more. Despite my repeated efforts to tell them that I am not interested in their products, they continued to call. Their agents gave fake names. When I asked them for their manager's name, that name was fake as well, and they would not give me their address--yes, I intended to pay them a visit to personally hex them. They said that they could not take my number off the list because their calls are "system-generated". I wonder why these atchays don't have the intelligence and the know-how to fix their own "systems". This particular system is an akyat-bahay and budul-budol system, if you ask me--an invasion of privacy disguised as a business offer.

Now that the ringer is off, I relish the pleasure of envisioning these atchays waiting at the other end of the line, losing money by the minute and by the second, trapped in the system-generated hell they created for themselves.