I hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate it when the goddamned marketing department of some fucking corporate chain store decides that it would be just a rosy, lovely, bottom line padding idea to ask all of their patrons their phone number! Let me say this in no uncertain terms: You do not need my phone number to conduct a cash transaction. All you need is my cash. That’s it. I’ll say it again. YO! CORPORATE FUCKWADS! YOU CAN’T HAVE MY PHONE NUMBER! makes me so goddamn motherfucking mad…grrrrr…
::vibrotronica vibrates with rage::
But, Juanita’s right. There’s no reason to take it out on the poor wage slave behind the counter. It’s not his or her fault.
OK. Here’s what we have to do. It’s easy. Give them a fake phone number, but not one that’s obviously fake. Choose a real exchange. Hell, give them the Better Business Bureau’s number, or City Hall, or, if you’re very industrious, give them their corporate headquarters number. The point here is that we must feed enough noise into their database to make their data useless. That way you drain resources from the company, who is, after all, paying for the data mining, etc., and spare future generations from the same indigity. If it doesn’t work, they will eventually stop doing it.