Last night some young kids were playing on their telephone. It turned out to be a cell phone. They called my home phone to play 'tricks' on my phone line. I was sound asleep when the first call came through. It startled me as any middle of the night phone call usually does. I had been sleeping for about 40 minutes. Late night calls to our home phone line usually means there is some kind of trouble brewing somewhere in my family. We are not a family who calls each other in the sleeping hours of the night unless it is an emergency. Therefore, when the land line rings in the middle of the night we usually get a little prepared before we answer it. It might be a piece of emergency news.
I answered the call. It was a young girl playing games on the phone trying to ask me who I am. I politely asked her to identify herself and why was she calling me. She just kept on asking me who I am. I recognized that she was not making a serious phone call so I told her I was going to hang up. I hung up. Immediately the phone rang and it was her again. She asked the same question. I asked her to identify herself. She thought that was real funny. She continued to ask me who I am. I hung up. She repeated this action four more times. On the last one I told her I would be calling the police to get them involved with this foolish act of harassment. I hung up and called the police.
The officer that answered the line told me it was considered menacing and harassment. He described several options to me and told me how I could press charges if I wanted to follow-up on the issue. He said the charges can be different for different areas where we live. All telephone harassment laws are protected by the Telecommunications Act of 1996. He said the phone companies actually take these kinds of foolish games very serious. He told me where I could find some numbers to call so I could report this activity to those telephone companies. I did exactly that. I also asked him not to call that caller nor go visit them, which he offered to do. I discovered I also have a phone feature that can trace the caller's number, even if they try to use *67 to block their in-coming caller ID. I looked the phone number up on my phone tracing system. I found the phone number of that caller.
Pay attention!
I went to the Internet and discovered two locations where that number was registered. One was a cell phone number in one area and the other was a land line in a separate area. For ninety nine cents on my credit card I was able to obtain the owner of the phones name, location of residence, annual income, the count of household residents living at that location, what each of their incomes were, where their last registered employers were located for each person at that location, whether or not they had committed recent crimes and if any vehicles were registered under each of those names located at that residence. This is a true report that I could download. Pay attention!
Since 911 in America, new opportunities have become readily available to common residents and have been increasing security potential to the tech savvy world. When I was younger I suspect I made a couple of prank phone calls in my life. I was not going to hurt or destroy this young ladies life by pursuing something this foolish with any serious charges. I did not have that desire and I shared my perspective about this little issue with the officer I spoke with on the phone. He was convinced with how I felt and therefore shared with me some of these current research opportunities. I think he shared them with me because he trusted that I would handle the information I find with good respect. I would and I did. I was more impressed and surprised at how easy it was to gather this kind of important and private information about a stranger to my sphere of information. Ladies and gentlemen, there are no more secrets. You can be found very easily. Your private information is digitally floating out there shared easily and commonly in hundreds of unique data bases. If a person knows exactly where to go to gather that private information it is easy to extract. General searches might not do the trick, but specific websites that officials use are very precise. Pat attention!
We live in a whole new world. A prank phone caller has no idea how all of this information can become so readily available with the silly little call they think they made, anonymously. Little do they know it is rather easy to gather information about where this person goes to school, where her parents live, what they drive, where all of them are employed and how much they earned last year. This information is no longer a secret. It is no longer hard to find. Pay attention!
Granted, it took some time and effort to extract this information. However, the truth still remains...it was available to find. I used this prank phone call experience to develop the example of how important it is to get serious about what you do in your business model. I have traveled a lot of times in my career. In fact, today I am heading to a cabin in the woods for a couple of days. My wife and I are taking some time off to go sit by a fire near a lake in the woods. We are taking our Kindles. We have some movies we rented to play while we are there. We roasted some fresh coffee beans a couple of days ago and they will be ready to grind and brew while we are there. We will be looking to visit one of the local restaurants in the area a couple of times. I checked them out online. They have customers who have rated how each one performed what it does for its trade and services. I read each post. I already know which one we will be attending. Pay attention!
We live in interesting times. The information age is so mature and growing so huge so fast that many of us do not fully recognize how each business model can use that information wisely. My wife and I have limited play time chips. We are just like you. We have too much to do with very little time to do it in. We use technology to help us get more things squeezed into our day of achievement. We use technology that also helps us add more time to the valuable things we like to play with and enjoy. We do not want to spend any wasted time going from one restaurant to the other in this remote area to find how we want to spend our enjoyment time. We selected the one with the open fireplace and good consumer reports. The other options will not be on our list. Pay attention!
I am not here to teach readers how to get effectively mean with prank phone callers. That is silly stuff. Do not waste your valuable time pursing second rate productions. However, use this information lesson to learn more about how you can add value to your business success by recognizing the increasing power of the new tools for marketing that have come to the business scene in this information society. Technology can be a very good friend if you learn how to manage its opportunities wisely. My wife and I were not tech savvy people in the 1990's. We are not early innovators. We are slow to change to use the newer tools that come with this huge trend of electronic world changes. That being said, look at how we use the tools that have arrived. We are just simple customers trying to maximize how we can squeeze in more fun and enjoyment with our limited time chips allowed. We are not the only customers who perform these kinds of helpful searches. My wife uses every coupon sight to find these wonderful recreational places we enjoy visiting at reduced costs. In the past six months, we have traveled to these wonderful places five times. Each time we spend money in an economy that people think stinks. Is your business model on our target path where we look to gather the information we want? If it is not, we will not be visiting your business model. It is that simple. Pay attention!
We live in interesting times. Our lives are planned out differently than ever before. My wife has become our great event coordinator. She has discovered an economical way to find us some very enjoyable things to do that do not kill the budgets we earn while offering us the pleasures we prefer to see. Technology is the tool she uses to accomplish that spending goal. Is your business placed logically on the best technology paths for us to see what you actually do? If not, we likely miss doing business with your model. Pay attention!
Take some time and begin your work to find a better way to promote your model. Get tech savvy help. Do some research and begin learning how your customers select where they go to enjoy their lives. Get familiar with how technology can become a wasteland of investment or a boom to business. Find useful ways to increase your technology presence. Make sure you work harder to gain better reports about what you do. I love it when I read glowing reports, one after another, about a place we plan to visit. I skip the ones who do not have good reports in a long line of negative sharing. It is not rocket science. If you do not use the technology growth in the efforts you expel to build your business stronger, why not? Just because we did not originally know how to use technology well did not stop us. You should adopt this same professional stance. Get informed. Get help. Create a new path for exposing how you do the best things you do. The world has changed. Get in line with how it does the things it does.
Above all, do not make any more prank phone calls. It is a lame thing to think that it will no longer hurt you.
I feel the same about any business owner who does not appreciate how much technology can help. If you are not in line with this simple truth, it is hurting your business. Think about those who we will not go visit because they could not be found promoting their best foot forward on the technology machines we used.
Pay attention!
Until next time...
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