Blue screen of death and you defeat it by installing linux.

I used to work at Blockbuster and there was this guy who worked with me who had a vendetta against Asylum. He was a manager and would tell everyone to warn people not to rent their movies and make sure they knew it wasn’t the movie they thought it was. At the time, their model was release the similar movie on DVD while the actual movie was still in theaters.

One day the dude comes in to work and he’s just furious. He had rented a movie called “30,000 Leagues Under the Sea” and when he got home his wife was like “Isn’t it ‘20,000 Leagues Under the Sea’?” He looked at the back and saw it was from Asylum. He said he couldn’t believe they had gotten him. After that he took them all the Asylum movies off the shelves and was like “NEVER AGAIN!” It was hilarious.

I had no idea who this was so I went and looked on IMDB and she was in a show called “Designing Women” and one of the top rated episodes has this description:

Suzanne [Burke] attends her high school reunion, where people shun her because she weighs more than she did in high school.

Irony.

Yeah it was kinda fun. I figured ever minute I had them on the phone was a minute they weren’t scamming old people with dementia out of their money, so at the very least I was doing something mildly good too.

Four hour guy I had a lot of clerical work to do at work that day and didn’t need to talk on the phone at all so I just kept him going. Would go off on long made up stories related to what he was saying. Told him about my kids and their kids and my deceased wife. They guy told me that my card was used to purchase (among other expensive things) “$3,000 worth of Bitcoin” and I kept being like “what’s a bite coin?” and he COULD. NOT. GET. PAST. me calling it bite coin instead of Bitcoin. He would correct me every time. Then I asked what that was and he told me it was a digital currency and I told him about my coin collection for like 8 minutes before he steered me back on topic. I only told him I was wasting his time because I was done with work.

I will say, one guy asked if I lived alone and I told him I do now because my wife of 47 years died two months ago and he said “Ahhh…that’s sad…” and hung up on me. So at least that guy wasn’t completely evil.

This is a tactic that worked for me, but your mileage may vary. I used to get dozens of spam calls a day on both my work and personal numbers. I did all the things that you’re supposed to do and they just kept coming. I also needed to answer unknown numbers on my work phone so I couldn’t just block them.

So after a while, I started answering the calls and calling them back when I got silence. I made sure I could talk to a person/scammer as often as possible. In the beginning I would just ask them if they felt good about themselves trying to scam people out of their money. They would generally just hang up but one guy gave this long speech about how if you were that dumb you didn’t deserve that much money and how he was living the American dream (although I did ask him if he was in American at which point he hung up on me). After that, I would just start trying to keep them on the phone as long as possible. My job is such that I can work and talk on the phone at the same time, so I made a word document that had a fake name, birth day, social security number, address, a fake person basically. Then I would put on my “old man” voice and just act stupid to keep them on the phone. I kept one guy on the phone for four hours as I pretended to be too inept to turn on my laptop to give him my IP address. He was quite upset when I told him I knew he was scamming me.

Anyway, I haven’t gotten a scam call in like 6 months. I think scammers put me on their do not call list. Maybe worth a shot?