The Next Call Is For . . .

Candidates for public office are getting fairly intense these last days before the election. Besides all the commercials on TV and the leaflets left on our door they’ve started doing robo-calls. A computer dials the next phone number on the list and a taped voice tells why an opponent ranks with the scum of the earth or why the campaign generating the call is promoting someone who could be the next messiah. It’s getting old.

I hang up on robo-calls but I’ve been able to tell which campaigns are more desperate. They’ve started calling my fax machine and this is causing some anxiety in the household. The fax (I call her Fanny) has been close enough to the computer monitor to read the web pages of the political doings and has heard the TV news. Fanny is one of the ‘undecideds’ and the robo-calls aren’t really helping. Should she vote against the guy who hates kittens or for the guy who wants to turn Lake Superior into a water park to increase tourism? Not needing to breathe, Fanny has no opinions about coal burning electrical plants but she does worry about the quality of electricity from wind farms (“Yeah,” shy wrote on a note she pushed through the delivery tray, “you humans can breathe better with wind power electricity but will there really be enough to fire my circuits?”) And so it goes. I can’t wait for Election Day to be over. The political commercials will be done and Fanny can go back to work as a fax machine instead of concerned (almost) part of the electorate.