“I’m sorry, I’m a student.” is my standard reply to the telemarketing mass that ring me late at night in the hope of interesting me in owning my own home/salt and pepper grinders/timeshare at the Gold Coast. But unfortunately, the other night when the Heart Foundation called me up I became temporarily distracted by the young male voice on the other end of the line, and forgot to hang up.
Ten minutes later he had coerced me into door-knocking for Heart Disease (a cure I presume, rather than a further spread of the disease itself). And so we ended the call, me a little bemused but not too distressed as charitable work well fits with my recent benevolent streak (see previous entry).
My strict ‘no telemarketing’ rule ran scared at the sound of a male voice hawking a worthy cause.
A moment later I heard my phone beep – a message:
“Heyy guess who! Lol I can get in some haa-uge trouble for violating the heart foundation privacy policy so u beta not dob me in for stealing ur numba lol wb x”
Two ‘LOLs’ is two too many in my book. A friend of mine maintains that an LOL is perfectly acceptable, IF, and ONLY IF the perpetrator ACTUALLY is laughing out loud at the time. I gave him the benefit of the doubt, and texted back:
“Sly move, telemarketer.”
This was soon followed by a response:
“Haha yeah I’m a telemarketing pimp lol… na I only started 3 weeks ago… U sound pretty cute u need to send me a photo lol. Fuck being a guys annoying sometimes, I cant do 2 things at once and it takes like 15 minutes to write a msg lol x”
Now two was two too many ‘LOLs’, but five in total!? I decided to cut the texting game short, and return to the serious business of devouring olives.
The Heart Foundation, previously focused on preventing and curing heart disease, will soon open doors to its new project entitled ‘Lonely Hearts’, which aims to prevent feelings of emptiness and promote emotional wellbeing by hooking up the lovelorn.
About 20 minutes later, my phone began to ring. Caller ID informed me that it was the Heart Foundation LOLer, and whilst common sense told me not to pick up, a sense of humour did.
The conversation, paraphrased, ran thus:
LOL: “Hey babe, how’s it going?”
Fiffles: “Um, fine… um… are we a little too early in the relationship to be calling each other ‘babe’?”
LOL: “LOL, don’t be a player hater n*gga!”
Fiffles: “Um, OK.” (NOTE: Dislike of ‘LOL’ dispersers outweighed by dislike of Australians or people of European descent EVER using the word ‘n*gga’)
LOL: “So do you have your license babe?”
Fiffles: “Yep.”
LOL: “Great babe, so you can come down to the Gold Coast to visit me!”
Fiffles: “So I didn’t catch your name.”
LOL: “Well, my name is Michael Patrick, actually, my sister’s name is Michaela, and my other sister is called Patricia, and when my parents finally had me, they decided to put the two names together.”
Fiffles: “Are you serious!? That is hilarious!”
LOL: “LOL… why?”
And so it went on. The end result was that he sent me a picture of himself, and urged me to jump on MSN and reciprocate. His hotmail address for MSN, he informed me, was ‘fondlinyabitchinthebackseatofmycar@hotmail.com’.
The picture he sent, however, revealed that he was not a ‘wigga’ as I had suspected, but rather an African-American hip-hop culture idolizer of possible Filipino heritage.
“What is the word for that?”, I wondered. “Figga”, I suppose, in retrospect.
‘Wiggas’, whilst admittedly misappropriating Black American culture, are pretty fly, for white guys.
*Please note, to protect the privacy of my suitor his names have been changed, and the e-mail address shortened slightly.
