Are emergency alert spam calls a harbinger of doom? What do they know that I don’t know?

The phone rang.

The number wasn’t in my contacts.

No good can come of this.

I answered.

Who knows? It could be a job offer.

It wasn’t.

The voice sounded like a pleasant young woman.

The voice told me one of my medical providers recommended me for an emergency alert system.

These are devices, such as necklaces and bracelets, you wear that call an ambulance if feel chest pains or fall and can’t get up.

Such devices became famous in the 1980s powered by a series of television commercials of an elderly woman pushing the button on her Life Alert device and shouting, “I’ve fallen, and I can’t get up!”

The slogan became as popular as “Where’s the beef?” — spoken by an old lady on behalf of Wendy’s hamburgers — and “Just say ‘no.’” — for a federal government anti-drug campaign backed by Nancy Reagan, also an old lady.

The 1980s were a good era for old ladies making pitches on TV.

Mom 1.0 was an old lady in the 1980s. I wonder how her life would have been different if she had gotten to pitch a product on TV. Maybe that’s why she was so bitter. Well, she was bitter about something anyway. She’s dead now. So it goes.

In 2021, the pitch comes from a recorded voice. I couldn’t tell how old the voice was, but it sounded less like “Where’s my lidocaine?” and more like “Let’s get margaritas!”

If the voice was to be believed, and believe me I had suspicions, my doctor broke multiple medical privacy rules and gave my contact information to a company who used telemarketing to sell medical emergency alert devices.

I doubt my doctor would do this. She can’t even get me to eat vegetables. It’s hard to imagine her calling in the telemarketers.

Spam annoys me, as it does most.

First of all, why sully the good name of a quality canned meat product like Spam?

Mom 2.0 makes a wonderful campfire dish with Spam, onions, potatoes, carrots and green and red bell peppers rolled up in aluminum foil and held over the campfire with a special spatula on a stick.

“Spam” with an uppercase “S” is good; “spam” with a lowercase “s” is bad.

Lowercase spam has been around long enough I can be nostalgic about it.

I miss OG spam.

OG used to mean “original gangsta,” which comes from hip-hop.

I don’t listen to hip-hop. I am afraid if I start listening to hip-hop, I will be accused of cultural appropriation.

“OG’s” meaning has evolved to just mean an exceptional, authentic and incredible person such as Taylor Swift or Bill Atkins, the guy who invented the device that made possible chocolate and vanilla twist cones.

OG spam was the lame jokes people forwarded you in bunches via email back when email was relatively new.

These jokes were all in text, young people. There was not an endless supply of GIFs and JPEGs from popular culture to draw upon for a meme.

The jokes were rarely funny.

They were an early indicator that some of your friends and family had very different ideas about how the world should work.

They had done you a favor for years by not talking about these notions during holiday gatherings.

We’re way past that now. We have whole networks designed to pour spam into our eyeballs and ears at all times.

I wouldn’t be surprised if mad scientists at Nike are working on a fabric that subliminally encourages us to buy more shoes that look like electric highlighters.

Anyway, I’m trying not to take this spam call selling a medical emergency alert system too personally.

Granted, my body is in pretty poor shape right now.

My brain is riddled with depression and anxiety.

My arthritis is bad in my back and knees.

I have tendonitis in my right elbow and shoulder.

My left seems fine most of the time. That’s good. I need one limb to move the loofah in the shower.

I don’t believe in harbingers, but I am in a vulnerable spot right now that I believe relates directly to some junk mail I got in March.

The first piece of mail I received after my TV job ended was a solicitation from a cremation company.

I wasn’t cremated nor did I die, which when that time comes, I hope they get it in the right order.

However, I endured a series of calamities that included some scofflaw stealing my identity and fouling my unemployment benefits and the Iowa governor backing out of a federal pandemic assistance program because, you know, she’s whimsical.

I am a couple summer school classes and two semesters away from earning my master’s degree and teaching license.

The last thing I need is more haunted spam throwing things off.

I’m sorry medical emergency alert bracelet people, but I’ve already fallen.

I’m trying to get up.