DIAL R FOR REVENGE
‘Lenny’ wastes telemarketers’ time
Nice fellow, that Lenny, though as a campaign worker for Pierre Poilievre discovered recently, you don’t want to get stuck talking to him.
“Oh good. Yes … yes, yes,” answers Lenny when the worker, whose name sounds something like “Segalle,” asks if he’s willing to put an election sign on his lawn.
But as a recording of the 11-minute, 14-second conversation posted to YouTube reveals, it’s all befuddlement from there.
“What was that again?” Lenny asks in his soft British accent. “Sorry, again?”
Segalle obligingly raises her voice as she quizzes Lenny on the voting intentions of his household, only to be treated to inside information on Lenny’s daughters — Rachel, a bit of a hothead, you know, and Larissa, the third-eldest but first in the family to go to university — before he again asks her why she’s calling.
And then there are the ducks. “Sorry, could you just hang on for one second here, hang on,” says Lenny to a chorus of quacks in the background.
Lenny, as you’ll have gathered by now, though poor, patient Segalle apparently never did, is a recording — a series of pitch-perfect responses designed to fool callers into thinking they’ve reached a genuine person with genuine interest in whatever they’re pitching.
“The dishonest telemarketers are the ones that Lenny is really intended for,” explains “Mango,” an Alberta software designer and big Lenny fan.
These are the callers who spoof their caller-ID numbers and otherwise flout do-not-call-registry rules to try to scam you with offers of cheap duct cleaning or superlow interest rates.
“Political telemarketers tend to follow the law,” adds Mango, who didn’t want his real name used. “But if they bother people who don’t want to be bothered, the other Lenny users and I see no moral reason why they should not talk to Lenny.”
But who is the real Lenny? Bit of a mystery, that (as Lenny might muse).
According to Internet chatter he’s an actor in Brisbane, Australia — though clearly of English origin — who made his recordings for a company that wanted to respond in kind to time-wasting callers. About 2013, however, the original Lenny stopped working, so Mango and other tech-types decided to recreate him based on the published recordings.
Mango’s version — “written with just 15 lines of computer code,” he boasts — has 16 “prompts” before returning to the start. An example from early in the sequence: “Someone did say last week, or call last week, about the same thing. Was that … you?”
Amazingly, callers tend to keep trying through at least a couple of loops, and one hung in for an “astonishing” 38:29, Mango reports.
Segalle — or is Seagulle? — gives up earlier but stays polite to the end, thanking Lenny for his “WONDERFUL HELP” (she’s shouting by this point) and wishing him “HAPPY VOTING, COME VOTING TIME.”
If the caller for Poilievre, former Conservative member for Nepean-Carleton, now running in the new riding of Carleton, later realized she’d been pranked, we’ll never know. A spokesman for the Poilievre campaign did not respond to messages.
One phone-bank operator making calls for the Conservatives is Toronto-based IMKT Direct Solutions. “This call was not made by our company,” IMKT president Andrew Langhorne insisted after listening to the Lenny recording.
If they bother people who don’t want to be bothered, the other Lenny users and I see no moral reason why they should not talk to Lenny.
Mango says the Lenny program, or bot, is easiest to install on Voiceover-Internet-Protocol or VOIP phone systems because most have features allowing you to selectively forward calls from specific numbers. But it is possible to employ on other phones, says the tech expert, who offers instructions on his blog that should be easy to follow for anyone who understands unified field theory.
And speaking of collisions — what happens when a “Pierre Poutine” style robocaller, like the automated system that sent Guelph voters to the wrong polls in 2011, meets a robo-responder like Lenny?
Mango isn’t sure, though he believes “a semi-automated system controlled by a human” once encountered Lenny and lost. (That recording is also on YouTube.)
Human caller or machine, our bet is that Lenny always gets the last, if somewhat confused, laugh.
And his ducks the last quack.