At least they ask questions which can be dismissed easily with "No thanks". A lot of the scammer/marketing salespeople have resorted to using conversation openers like "How has your day been?", which just makes people feel awkward, because their brains had already sent the signal for "No thanks" and they need to try and think of another way of ending the conversation, which makes them pause, stop walking, and stutter.
Then, the tendrils of the carnivorous sales-plant clasp tightly and won't let go easily.
Your straightforward explanation with its little twists and turns spiced with bizarre imagery, has sent me into a dream-state and prompts me to launch into a modern-day Chautauqua [Pirsig variant] .
The mind itself is a circus of the mind. The more you think about thinking, the more you know about less and less, like a reactive Java applet discovering that thrown exceptions are no longer an exception to the rule. Interaction with other people can be a series of thrown exceptions, each carrying in a new bit of sensory information and a dollop of performance anxiety. There is a plasticine boundary at introvert and extrovert where the verts clash along a path of missed and misinterpreted signals. Do you ride it like a wave, because you are a skilled extrovert... or...
Do you wait until the desperation for a response forces you to act, withdraw --- creak the rusty iron hopper door shut and open the cogitation valve to chuff steam to drive slow pistons of thought, flywheel gaining, release clutches on belts attached to intricate taffy-twisters and anvil-thumpers and other outlandish devices you have built over the years to try and make 'sense' of the outside world? From this contraption possible answers and actions begin to emerge on a conveyor, like cartoonish misshapen parodies of some finished product. We have to adjust the dials a little. Then you spot it, the first real credible response! But no (Inspector #3 says), it's trite and silly, it gets tossed into the recycle bin. And so on, until the end products begin to resemble credible responses, but no (Inspector #4 says), they do not possess a requisite degree of novelty and cleverness. It's all plain corn chips until the product passes by the Spray-'N-Squirt Gizmo. Like a hall of mirrors it is an endless conveyor with countless Inspectors, and as you perceive the pointlessness of this process a sense of dread takes hols and you finally push the Red Button. Bells clang, the conveyor stops, and this absurd industrial plant in-a-box tosses out the last thing on the conveyor:
"Uhm..."
Dilbert pulls the fire alarm to escape the horror of a so-called 'casual confrontation' after spotting a stranger approaching down a long, narrow hallway.
Imagine if everyone had glowing Sim jewels floating above their heads indicating their emotive state and intentions. It could be the next Google Project. Imagine the horror of such persons if everyone they have ever known has one, and they come face to face with a jewel-less person for the first time.
The First Law of Robotics cannot be circumvented. We can, however, find ways around it by tampering with the definition of humanity. If you ever encounter a robot that says, "Greetings, incidental object of no certain purpose" ... run like hell.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled Slashdot discussion.
To your scattered bodies go.
