All Work and No Play Makes Lacey a Silly Girl

I suppose since now I have been working for a few weeks I should give you an update and tell you a little about what I do. The company I work for tracks advertisements for text message services. I am sure that you have either experienced or heard about someone who replied to a text message ad and then suddenly continued to receive useless annoying texts and your phone bill skyrocketed. Well there are rules and regulations that concern the advertisements so that they are not misleading and consumers can be aware of the unfortunate contract they are about to enter. I am currently working for the intercept department, so my job is to actually find advertisements. Sometimes it is a ton of fun and other times it is tedious, but overall I do enjoy it. So we search newspapers, magazines, online, and tv, to find these annoying advertisements.

When I am searching online I search everything text message. However, I have found that it actually works best when searching online to pretend as if you are a gullible young teenager. Basically do everything on the internet that common sense dictates that you should not. So I click on all of the things that pop-up on my computer. When I visit a site and a little box pops up telling me "Congratulations, you are the 2,345, 987,008th visitor to this site, click to collect your prize. " I enter my phone number and email address into suspicious looking forms. Well, not really my phone number but I have created a wonderful fake persona, who I have lovingly named Bimbo Bambi. I google random things that I think teenagers would want like, "does he like me." In return I am rewarded with these wonderful little quizzes that end into a prompt to enter my phone number to receive the information that it has to state is fictional.

Another entertaining part of the job is when I get to actually test these services. They really provide you pearls of wisdom in these services, great value for money (heavy sarcasm.) They cost up to $20 to sign up and then they charge you $10 or more a week to receive crappy text messages. My favourites are to text your partners name and your name to a number and they will tell you if it is a good love match. Then they don't even text you back with the results, but instead will respond with "advice." One said, "make your partner feel special, tell them that their words are your food and their breath is your wine." Thanks for that, I am sure that will surely help a relationship. My other favourite is the "sexy chats." They tell you to pick a girl (which we are convinced is just some photo they found on facebook and created a profile for) and you are supposed to text her name to a number. They try to make it seem like a real person at first, but they are not. Most commonly something like this will happen, the "girl" will text back, "I am so lonely want to exchange profile pictures?" We don't actually respond to this, but about 3 minutes later we still receive a message that reads, "I really liked your picture, want to see mine."

Basically, we are trying to make sure that at least a few people are saved from this text message smut. On the other hand, the people who actually respond to such prompts as, "Asian cuties, so cute, lonely and waiting for you," or think that they can really turn their phone into a mobile x-ray scanner, probably deserve to have to pay for it in premium text message charges.

p.s. I even had the pleasure of trying to order a Russian bride by text message the other day.
p.p.s. On a totally random note, Calamine lotion is purple not pink here.