I don’t want to be that guy

Ron Soltys

There’s nothing I love more than sleeping in after a long night of work, writing papers and video games. Incidentally, the worst thing in the world is getting woken up for a crappy reason.

I understand my own perception of 9 a.m. is somewhat different than the rest of the world. I purposefully schedule classes that start no earlier than 11 and prefer they begin after noon. After a semester or two here, I’ve basically forgotten what nine in the morning even looks like anymore.

There was a test waiting for me Friday at my first class. Adjacent to my bed is a nightstand, and on top of it rests my Nintendo DS, which doubles as my alarm. In the dead of the night, I set it to wake me up at 10:45, but instead met the morning at 9:09 to the sound of my phone ringing.

There has to be some kind of semi-decent reason for my phone to be playing “Music Sounds Better with You”; nobody calls me except for my roommates, my friends, my girlfriend and my parents. I am a little puzzled to see an 866 number, but rationalize that it might be work or the university calling.

To my dismay, the reality of the matter is that I pick up the phone and inform the caller they are indeed speaking to Ronald S…yolteez? Yeah, this is him. At this point, the person on the other end — it sounded like a young man — began talking without pausing between any of his words so he could get the canned script of this pointless offer out on the table, and at no point in his multi-minute pitch was there a single moment for me to inform him there was no way I was going to accept any service or offer. How would they make any sales if they provided people with an opening to turn them down? I hate being an impolite person when I am interacting with people I don’t really know.

At a restaurant, I don’t ever want to make a fuss if a server does something that kind of irritates me. I, at no point, wish to raise my voice in an office when something doesn’t go the way I want. When a cashier mucks up a purchase and we have to figure out what in the world is going on, I have no intention of berating the teenage girl for a simple mistake. I don’t want to be that guy.

I didn’t want to be that guy on the phone, but any time a telemarketer calls me, there’s some vindictive spirit living deep in some chasm of my body that wishes I could hate this person to death. I want to just interrupt and shout “NO THANK YOU NEVER CALL ME AGAIN.” I want to queue up Rick Astley on YouTube and play it loud enough to wake up people the next building over. If I am losing two hours of sleep, it had better be for a good reason.

But like I said, I am not the kind of person to uppercut a child for spilling ice cream on my shoes. I waited and waited and waited, told him no, told him no again — until finally he accepted my response, and back to sleep I went.

Ron Soltys knows he is a sloth and you don’t need to remind him. Send him ways to make someone’s terrible job worse at [email protected].