Tag Archives: robo call

And from the department of hmm….?

‘Meant to pass this along earlier, but it slipped my mind.

On or around May 5, some Vermonters like me received a robo-call ‘survey’ paid for by Phil Scott for Governor, or some similarly named group. Only I got the call four times in a row within less than an hour.  I wrote a few word about the anomaly on Green Mountain Daily and gave it no more thought.

I welcomed the opportunity to triple whammy the GOP guesstimator, but others may have been less amused by the calls.

A few days ago, I received a phone call from an attorney in Chicago, who asked if I had given my consent anywhere to being contacted by the Vermont GOP, and I told him that I had not.

Somehow, he had gotten wind of my blogpost and was investigating the possibility that the Scott campaign had violated campaign regulations.

I couldn’t provide him with much information beyond what I had already written, but I promised to direct anyone else who received the call(s) to contact his firm.  So I am passing the information along to our GMD readers/writers to use as they see fit.

It might just be a tempest in a teapot, based on my imperfect memory of how the survey was introduced or framed; or it might have something to do with the number of iterations…I have no idea.

BP checked and the law firm appears to engage in ambulance-chasing excursions, so we doubt the veracity of the attorney’s assertion as to who told him to contact me (unnamed in this post.)  I have therefore also removed his contact information from the post. 

 

 

 

 

RRR: Republican Robo Redundancy

Tonight around 7:00 PM, when most households  could be expected to be attempting  a quiet dinner, I completed a phone survey, paid for by Phil Scott For Governor, four times!

The calls originated from North Troy, and I took the first ungrudgingly.  I am always happy to waste Republican dollars; and fortunately, I was planning a late dinner.

It was a “three question” survey:

Question 1:  Do you support strongly Phil Scott for Governor? Do you support him moderately? Do you support a Democrat? Are you undecided?
Question 2:  Do you strongly support Bruce Lisman for Lt. Governor? Do you support a Democrat or other candidate (or something like that)? Are you undecided?
Question 3: What is the most important issue to you? There were seven choices, some of which were dog whistles, but I chose the environment just to be perverse.

As soon as I hung-up, the phone rang again and I took the poll again; and again twice after that.   I would like to think that I wasn’t the only lucky respondent to get multiple opportunities to ding the same poll; and I would also like to believe that others like me, took full advantage of the situation to maximize obfuscation.

I hate robo calls, but it is my great pleasure to take them at the expense of the caller. I just do something else, like checking my e-mail, while they prattle-on.  Try it, you’ll like it.

In this, the year of the Trump Dumpf, we need all the devilish distraction we can get.