Boy! You certainly must be careful when dialing the phone. There are only so many 1-800 (toll free) numbers available and a lot of them have, well, interesting services to offer.
The phone number for Adobe Customer Service is one digit off from a phone sex service. The other day I dialed up Adobe and instead of dialing an 8 I dialed an 9. This is what I heard:
Hi baby, do you want to massage my feet or suck my toes…?
I found that a wee bit unusual for Adobe Customer Service. Usually you get someone on the line with a thick Indian accent. A guy who says his name is “Mark” or a gal who is “Rebecca.”
The voice was recorded, and had the same intonation as the “We’ve recently changed our menu options, so pay attention” voice. In fact, I wasn’t really paying attention at first. (Who does?). So she had to say this before I realized my mistake:
Foot Fetish fun is only 69 cents per minute…
At that point I hung up, checked the number again, then finally was connected to Mark in Bangalore who told me that Adobe still has not processed my refund request and would I kindly resubmit it.
I didn’t bother asking if Mark wanted to participate in some foot fetish fun or even inquire as to his willingness to accept 69 cents per minute for some serious telephone giggling. I don’t believe that he would have understood.
OpenDNS Dept. A reader sent me an e-mail asking about a service called OpenDNS. Not having heard of it, I looked into it — and was delighted with what I found. OpenDNS is a web page proxy that filters out adult and other offensive web sites. By using the OpenDNS servers, you can safely surf the web without fear of being visually assaulted should you mistype a web page address. A good thing.
Un-bloat Windows Vista. Even some folks at Microsoft have admitted that Windows Vista is bloatware. To help ease the problem, software developer Dino Nuhagic has introduced vLite. What it does is to slim down Windows Vista, transforming it into something useful from its current circus Fat Man physique. Be forewarned: Using vLite is a one-way trip, it’s not user-friendly software, and I do not recommend it for the casual user.
