Paid.
Friends don’t keep calling friends when asked not to.
I did that, and yet the problem remained. Is there some special flick of the wrist I need to use so that telemarketers will vanish? (SFX along the lines of the ending of Raiders of the Lost Ark optional.)
This has got to be the dumbest argument I’ve seen this week, and that’s saying something.
There is an obvious and fundamental difference between an irrational prejudice (i.e. all those examples which you, in frankly offensive tactic, attempt to equate to telemarketing) and a rational wrath directed at people who choose to intrude upon your life to the detriment thereof. The fact that you would expect people to put aside this perfectly reasonable anger when its last nerve has been rubbed raw (i.e. in late October of a Presidential election year) is the cherry on the stupidity sundae.
The Universe has a dark sense of humor – just as I posted this, some drone showed up to ring the bell and then start knocking when I failed to open the door within 0.5 seconds. Judging from the clipboard I saw through the peephole, it was yet another political minion. Apparently the drone’s programming was upgraded with a “patience” subroutine between the bell ringing and the knocking; the latter continued for about three minutes before he gave up.
Perhaps the defenders of telemarketing and other such pestiferous intrusions should wait until after the election, at which time they may encounter a marginal reduction in vitriol.
Just for the record, I love niggers, Jews, poofters and women.
Just like I did this week when ETHICAL companies paid me about sixty bucks for my time and thoughts. As opposed to unethical, crazy stupid telemarketers. The sort of true morons who literally can’t tell the difference between hated for being an asshole telemarketer who annoys people all day . . . and being my best friend’s mom who was shoved into a French concentration camp where they killed her parents for being Jewish and nearly killed her as well just for being Jewish.
Because when I hang up on you because you call my house and then want my time and don’t want to pay me for it or would like to sell me a product I don’t want or need, it is exactly like when someone burned a cross on a black buy’s lawn because he wanted to vote or beat up the gay couple down the block because they’re gay.
:rolleyes:
I think it’s more about having an acceptable target.
Like Lynn’s scenario of getting called all night by telemarketers… when she had a little baby… and also had a job that required answering the phone 24/7…
Oh yeah right. What a big fat liar.
Anyway, when big fat liars like Lynn need somebody to look down on, they can’t look down on the traditional groups. So they look around for some petty annoyance and make it out to be the worst thing in the world and blame the people who take part.
For example, Steve MB claimed to hate telemarketers more than the KKK hates non-whites. I presume he’s exaggerating, but that he really does hate “telemarketers”.
I put it in quotes because I don’t really know what he means by it. I suspect he means bill collectors, because in my experience, telemarketers simply aren’t as bad as some people are saying they are. I hear bill collectors are a lot worse. Also, Steve seems pretty stupid and that sounds like the sort of mistake he’d make.
Not that telemarketers aren’t bad. They are, correctly, associated with overpriced services, making marks of the elderly, and fly by night businesses. The worst ones have made it so that people are more likely to refuse to take calls from an unfamiliar number and possibly miss out on an emergency call. Most are innocuous, of course, unless you’re the sort of socioplegic who can’t handle getting phone calls. In my experience, most are for charities. I’m not saying that they’re volunteers. It’s apparently a common practice for charities in Australia to hire a marketing company to solicit donations.
But this thread wasn’t even supposed to be about telemarketers. As the name suggests, telemarketers are selling something. Pollsters aren’t. They want to get people to answer a set of questions, maybe for market research to aid in selling something, or maybe to get your voting preference.
Pollsters can be bad too. Push polls are sleazy, of course. I don’t doubt that there are other bad practices. However, I saw no such practices at the office I worked at and the people who worked there were quite ordinary, They were not callous monsters, laughing when they woke up some shift worker. There were a lot of students, some middle aged women who wanted an evening shift, and a few guys like me who were hard up for work.
I must’ve called thousands of people when I did that job, incidentally. None of them said I woke them up that I can recall. The poor shift worker with a dangerous job who must keep his or her phone on for some reason, making every phone calls he or she receives into a potential contributing factor in a fatal accident… yeah, a bit of a stretch. Someone that unimaginative has no business doing dangerous work. If this was a real problem, every wrong number you ever made may have killed somebody.
Bingo!
You are absolutely right, and those weaselly exceptions add to my hostility level by having weaseled their way into being able to thumb their noses at my wish to have some control of the phone I’m paying for.
What you did there. I see it. Now comes the part where I attempt to justify my rudeness and the debate centers on my behavior and not the actual topic.
Likewise. Seems a fair amount of people in this thread don’t even feel like making the effort.
Good to know. Keep up the good work. I’ll be sure not to address you in any further lectures.
Feel better by insulting people? Doesn’t happen. The point that I was responding to really was stupid and was basically an attempt to discredit my point via the “you just don’t understand” approach taken by teenagers everywhere. I merely responded in kind and accurately.
Meanwhile every single unwanted telephone call I receive has been at least polite. Thus I respond in kind and promptly move on to being irked by things far more irksome than a two second waste of time.
Lynn’s scenario was an analogy to a shift worker trying to sleep during afternoon/evening hours. Are you really so daft as to not understand that?
Her example is strained beyond plausibility. She put together a perfect storm of bullshit that never happened to anybody, except maybe Ned Flanders types, and tries to use that as a rationale for strangers calling her being all evil. As I said, if the example was legit, people who dial the wrong number once in a while should be liable to charges of reckless endangerment.
Not completely implausible, I don’t think. I’m knocked up, and my husband works nights. In a month or two, we’ll already be sleep deprived, and we’ve gotten rid of our home phone because of telemarketer calls, but we each keep our phones on and the volume up because we have an older kid at school who, sooner or later, is going to break an arm or throw up in the lunchroom or something.
I can see telemarketer/survey/any kind of unsolicited calls to my husband’s cell phone being a pretty big nuisance in this case.
And, furthermore, I don’t understand why we’re saying that pollsters are so different than telemarketers. Are they not being paid by a third party to make cold calls?
He’s not a telemarketer.
Disclosure time. When I was in college, I worked for the college doing phone surveys. We were and are fairly well known, and our results cited in newspapers and websites. I never really felt guilty or bad about what I was doing, nor felt the need to apologize for it, in spite of what some people in this thread had said. (I did work for a little while in college as a telemarketer. It was horrible, I felt slimy, and was fired after a short time because I couldn’t make any sales. So, you want to say bad stuff about telemarketers, go ahead. It’s a horrible industry.)
But for the survey taking, I didn’t feel bad. I realize it was a bit of an inconvenience and imposition for the people I was calling. They wanted to sit down and eat dinner, or put the kids to bed, or watch CSI or whatever, and I was getting in the way of that. That being said, while they were free to say “I don’t want you to call me anymore” (and I’d take them off the list), or “I don’t have time right now” (and I’d put them on a list for callbacks.), most of the people we called were eager to answer and help.
The way I see it, we’ve got an election going on, and if you go over to the election forum on SDMB, you’ve got all sorts of people talking about “Oh, Obama’s ahead in Ohio, but Romney’s ahead in Florida, and Gallup says that Romney’s up by 5 points, but can you trust their methodology”, and all that, and you’ve got websites like realclearpolitics and fivethirtyeight and the like all asking “Who’s going to win the election”. And even when it’s not election time, in Great Debates, you see all the time, when people make arguments (numbers made up) “57% of people opposed the war in Iraq”, or “Congress’s approval rating is lower than it’s ever been”, or whatever. There’s a whole plethora of statistics and opinions that people find interesting and rely on to make their point.
The thing is, though, it’s like Albert King sang. Everybody wants to go to heaven but nobody wants to die. If you want these polls and statistics, if you like talking about this sort of stuff, you have to put up with the fact that you’re going to get calls from survey takers, because you can’t have the one without the other. And I think it does do a service, and, as annoying as answering them can be, it’s a net positive for society.
The fundamental difference is that telemarketers are salesmen. They’re tasked to sell a product, usually one they’re not very educated on, and are are either given sales quotas or commissions. So, they have a vested interest in your response and often times use hardsell or unethical methods to try to pressure you in a sale.
People doing phone surveys don’t have a vested interest in how you answer. They’re not trying to convince you of anything or get you to spend money. They just want to ask you questions. How you answer them is up to you, and they have no need to use the hard sell.
You might. I don’t. So don’t call me.
Yeah, I don’t think anybody was planning to. But as long as it’s legal and you have a phone, you might get a call, Howard Hughes. No matter if:
[ul]
[li]Your number is unlisted[/li][li]You only have a mobile phone[/li][li]Your butt gets really, really sore when you are asked to rate things on a scale of 1 t0 10[/li][/ul]
I guess you’ll have to try to get a law made if you think survey calls are so bad. Except politicians basically live on polls and most people don’t mind so I guess you’re screwed.
Wrong. The answer is OPT-IN. Otherwise, you’re as much of a nuisance as any other tele-spammer. In fact, worse, because you’ve weaseled an exception to the DNC list, which gives the person paying for the phone a little say in how it’s used.
Tell you what, I’ll decide for you what is a worthwhile use of your time and phone, then I will call you during your sleep hours, and I will use the Flyer approach of calling over and over any target who refuses to donate his/her time but can’t divine the exact words of the magic incantation that will get Flyer to go away.
Sound fair and reasonable? No? Then why do you think it’s OK for Flyer and its ilk to do this to the rest of us?
So explain Flyer’s smug boasts about how he? will keep calling the same victim until said victim finally gives in. That’s hard sell in spirit, even if money isn’t involved.
I actually don’t mind doing surveys all that much, provided that I’m up anyway and I’m not getting that many surveys. I’d vastly prefer to get paid, naturally. But what gets up my nose is a surveyor’s assumption that s/he has a RIGHT to call anyone as often as necessary, and also the attitude that the surveyor doesn’t have any obligation to abide by the target’s wishes to be removed from the calling list, unless the target recites a specific magic phrase which the surveyor isn’t going to disclose.
In fact, assuming that I’m up and not waiting for a phone call, I positively delight in taking “push” polls, where some company or candidate is trying to force favorable responses. How do I feel about Acme Department store? Well, each time I’ve been in the local store, I found that the selection was very poor. There was almost nothing that I wanted, and of the items that I was interested in buying, I found that the prices were astronomical. Have I heard the store’s slogan? Almost certainly not, unless it’s on the internet…I rarely watch TV. That sort of response.