An unlikely prankster
Did you call Dr Gecko in emergency?
WE ALL hate telemarketers. They call right in the middle of lunch or during the busiest time of the day and they usually plug crap that makes absolutely no sense or material difference to our lives.
I happen to hate telemarketers so much that I appointed myself the unofficial spokeswoman for the recently established Australians Who Hate Telemarketers.
But, what if that telemarketer was a tiny gold dust day gecko?
Doctor Claire Simeone, a seal expert and director of the Ke Kai Ola Marine Mammal Hospital in Hawaii, took to Twitter after receiving a string of anonymous calls she assumed were from an annoying telemarketer, for whom she had absolutely no time.
“So yesterday I started getting calls at our hospital,” Dr Simeone wrote.
“I was getting lunch, so I thought maybe someone had a seal-related question.”
The good doctor picked up the phone but was greeted with an eerie silence.
No introductions, no discounts on funeral cover, no heavy breathing, just silence.
When she received no response, Dr Simeone hung up, but was called straight back by the creepy stranger.
Whatever telemarketing company this was, their silent marketing strategy clearly wasn’t working because she kept hanging up them.
But this industrious stranger was not giving up easily, and called Dr Simeone back nine times in the space of 15 minutes.
“I start to panic a bit, and drive back to the hospital. Seal emergency? I am on it,” she wrote.
Dr Simeone arrived back at the hospital to complete calm, which seemed even more strange.
Another call came through. “It’s coming from inside the hospital,” she wrote.
Dr Simeone called her telco provider to see if her phone was “on the fritz”.
“Meanwhile, several other people call the hospital, asking why we are calling them incessantly.”
The telco man told Dr Simeone it “might be an issue with one of our phones” or the software installed at the hospital.
“He confirms that, yes, a bazillion calls are coming from one line,” she wrote.
“But I look at our office line. It’s not that one.
“He asks me to look around to find the problem line.
“I walk around the hospital. Not the fish kitchen. Not the office. Not the viewing room. I get another call from (the telco man) on my cell.
“I enter the laboratory. “That’s the line! I approach the phone …”
There, perched on top of the desk phone, was a tiny gold dust day gecko, clearly exhausted from hitting the phones since the crack of dawn.
Not only did this doctor receive about 15 anonymous calls from an entrepreneurial gecko, but so did hundreds of other hospital clients across Hawaii.
It goes to show that size doesn’t matter and, even if your feet are so adhesive you need help to remove them from the keypad, you too can become a telemarketer if you truly believe in yourself.
As for Dr Simeone, she had to apologise to the telco man for the confusion, who informed her: “Well, I haven’t heard that one before.”
“I had to send out a note to all of our staff and volunteers, who may have received telemarketing calls,” she wrote. “I immediately hired gecko.” Hopefully the gecko raises major funds for the Marine Mammal Centre and is given an immediate promotion.