Giving bureaucrats a taste of their own medicine!

I love it when officious bureaucrats get slapped down! A Maryland father did precisely that to officials of his school district. The Daily Mail reports:

When Aaron Titus was woken up at 4.30am by an automated ‘robocall’ from his children’s school - to say it was closed because of snow - he got angry.

Then he got even.

The lawyer, 31, looked up a robocall company of his own and taped a message before asking it to be send out to the school’s governors.

At 4.30am the next day, their phones started ringing and, when they answered, the following 29-second message was played.

It said: ‘This is a Prince George's County School District parent, calling to thank you for the robocall yesterday at 4.30 in the morning.

‘I decided to return the favour. While I know the school district wanted to ensure I drop my child off two hours late on a snow day, I already knew that before I went to bed.

'I hope this call demonstrates why a 4.30am call does more to annoy than to inform.’

It concluded: ‘Quit robocalling parents at 4:30 in the morning or at least allow us to opt out of these intrusive calls.’

. . .

Mr Titus, from Upper Marlboro in Maryland, said he wanted the governors to ‘share the pain’ so he carried out his stunt. School board member Donna Beck was among those who were woken up by it.

She said she was up until 3am looking over school budgets and was woken up an hour and a half later.

Then she listened to the message, and ‘immediately I knew, it's a prank'.

When she later realised it actually came from a parent, she acknowledged that ‘calls at that hour of the morning are a bad idea’.

There's more at the link.

No mention of how the other school 'governors' - a British term for their equivalent to school board members - reacted to being woken at so unearthly an hour . . . but I hope they got the message!



Peter