There are stupid people, very stupid people and scammer. Since a few weeks, my Skype number gets more and more calls from a tech-support call-centre trying to trick me into installing viruses onto my computer.

The scam is rather old, and well described in the ‘Hello, I am from Microsoft’ article.

Trouble is: I am (a) not stupid and (b) not a Windows user.

I used to get annoyed by those calls, until inspiration struck me. Those fellows probably have not enough fun in their life that they start pestering other people. So I give back what I can to make their life merrier.

My personal goal: Keep them in the line for at least 30 minutes. So far, the best I managed in this game was 7 minutes 30 seconds. This particular time it ended with a unhappy call-centre person calling me non-printable words for messing with him.

The fact that I got to 7 minutes, surprised me. In the 3rd minute, I had to congratulate him for correctly guessing that I have a Mac. Yeah, my horses ran through with me. Silly me! That’s not the sane way to win the game. After that I was able to delay defeat by bluntly lying about the manufacturer of my laptop. The drone actually ignored the content of the congratulation and continued to try to bring me to press “Win-R” for another 3 minutes. 

Only after that he got the hint that I may not play fair and started to throw abuse in my direction. I guess his karma account must be rather empty now, after all these non-printable words.

I do admit, I did not like the call.

Seriously. 7 minutes 30! I lacked proper preparation and a good script, and was not able to keep the drone in the air for as long as I wanted to. Well, not long and they will call again. They always do …

And at some point I will win.

30 minutes. And what is your personal call-centre holding time?