Had the OP stopped at pitting co-workers and her boss, I would never have commented or even followed this thread.
But when the OP pits the people who pick up the phone for the unsolicited calls… well, I get those calls and felt compelled to clarify the TRUTH from my experiences.
I doubt that I’ve ever had a call from the OP, but when I get a telemarketer/political/charity call… I’m not thinking “wow, maybe it’s the OP who will cheerfully hang up on a single ‘no thanks’” – instead I have decades of experience with telemarketers that are ABSOLUTELY nothing like OP describes.
So, OP may be great, their company may be great, but the fact is that some people do not want to receive ANY telemarketing calls at ALL, EVER. And their response to OP’s call will be the same as it is for any other telemarketer despite all the rainbow unicorns at the OP’s particular call center.
Having a different point of view or different experiences are not rudeness.
Lately, we’ve been solicitations that are recordings. Nothing you can do about it. And a lot of time it shows up “unavailable”, so I don’t know who’s calling. My mother won’t answer, but that’s not a hot idea, since there HAVE been legit calls with “unavailable”. (Once it was my grandmother, some reason) So in those cases, there’s no way to get them to stop.
I did have a telemarketer call a few months ago – and we’re on the state DNC list. I told her to put us on their’s, and said specifically that we were already on a government one. I was fucking pissed.
Actually, don’t say “take me off of your list.” Because they’re allowed to interpret that as you not wanting to be on the DNC list. Say “put me on your DNC list.” It’s a sleazy trick, yeah.
And yeah, OMG, it IS better to be on welfare than be a telemarketer. I don’t have much respect for people who harass others for a living. Yeah, I know sometimes it’s a choice between that and being homeless. But that still doesn’t require me to listen to you when you call me. Some professions are sleazey, and telemarketing is one of them.
(At least junk mail I can throw away. Yeah, I know, landfills, blah blah blah. It’s still not as annoying)
O I’ve gotten calls from Rachael. Luckily when I got my first one I’d already heard people bitching about it so I knew it was a scam. I added the # to my contact list as a # to send straight to voicemail. That seemed to fix it. I think I got it again under a different # and added that one. I haven’t had one in a bit, lucky me.
Your info on it is interesting. Obama should find a way to kill off Rachael, that would get him more votes than having Osama bin Laden killed!
Okay, in the future I will cover my face and ring a bell as I approach the SDMB because I am a leper and do not deserve to be in the presence of good, clean people like you. :rolleyes:
Maybe I was too subtle when I said that I was happy that so few of you have been placed in my position. In fact I was wishing desperate straits on you all but I didn’t click the rolleyes smilie. Okay, I didn’t mean that, really. You may be assholes who might deserve a buttfucking by the economy to give you some sense, but I would never wish the misery of financial ruin on your families.
Lynn, we are longtime friends and I feel I can give you some heartfelt advice: If telemarketers disturb your sleep, TURN OFF THE RINGER ON YOUR FUCKING LANDLINE PHONE! Have people you want to call you call you on your cell. You have been complaining about those interruptions for years, but I thought the solution was so obvious that a smart person could come up with it on her own. I guess I was wrong.
Guin, again, longtime friends and all, but it looks like I need to remind you that I am an able-bodied male and, as a result, do not qualify for public assistance. Going on welfare was not an option for me to take so I would not offend the sensibilities of my friends at the SDMB. Short of my being banned you are stuck with me as I am.
Enkel, that reporter took it most of the way by identifying Chris Ambrosia. The next step should be taken by those he has harassed. Maybe a class action suit would work. It sounds like, instead of bitching on this message board, you should join one for other victims of “Rachel” and the group of you could find a lawyer willing to work on contingency. It should be easy; Arizona is where personal injury lawyers go to die.
Sure, there have been some understanding people in this thread and others with reputations for being assholes who have taken the opportunity to demonstrate how they got their reputations, but most of you are intelligent people who are lashing out. I’m the target, which I expected when I opened this thread, but I have a thick skin. What I have learned is how insular and stupid so many of you are. It is not rocket science avoiding telemarketers, especially as the law has shut down most of them already. These are techniques that people dumber than most Dopers figured out on their own:
Look at who is calling. Don’t pick up the phone on the first ring because the Caller ID won’t come up until the second.
If it comes up as a strange name, a city name, or “unknown caller,” take the call but be prepared to play the Do Not Call card, which ONLY stops calls from that specific company. It is NOT part of the National Do Not Call Registry. And there is a good chance that it is a legal call because, if you are like my customers, you have an established business relationship with them and they can call you for eighteen months since your last purchase. And even if you ask to be put on their DNC list, they legally have three months to purge your number. Do Not Call is not a cure-all. Educate yourself here.
Please be pleasant. The call will go faster and your blood pressure will not rise. I have only been at this a week and I have had a nice, laughing time with customers while I read them our DNC legalese. Nobody likes making the calls any more than you like taking them, but there is no reason for either of us to be miserable. Save your anger for morons who kill people over YouTube videos.
Do not be afraid to escalate. That person on the phone does not work on his own. Ask for his supervisor, then ask for his supervisor’s supervisor. Everybody in the chain of command hatehateHATES it when an underling sticks him with a problem. And never forget what Dopers were all taught the first time we failed to research something: Google is your friend. And it becomes a better friend all the time because you can find the names, phone numbers, and sometimes even the emails, of the bosses at a company. Make their lives, or the lives of their assistants, miserable until you get satisfaction. Be a troll, but be a troll who is polite and disappointed that it had to come to this, as you have always seen XYZ Corp as an honorable company (sniffle).
As in any battle, be confident that you can beat them. They are not smarter than you and you know more tricks because they are likely to have been telemarketers for only a few weeks. There is, after all, a bit of turnover in this field.
And while I have your attention, we have this product that I believe will help you move your business to the next level…
Whether you’re aware of it or not, you come across worse with every post you make. I started out minimally sympathetic to your plight, but it’s clear you’re right where you deserve to be. You’ve found your dream job. Congratulations.
dropzone, because you haven’t done this job before, I don’t think you realize that many of the solutions you offer people to stop harassment by telemarketers cannot work with most of them because the options aren’t available. Such as trying to escalate - 99% of the time you will just get hung up on, and called again. With some (most?), it doesn’t matter how smart you are because you cannot beat them, at least not without a lot of help, because you cannot pin them down. There is some company that has called us and left a robo-message at least once a week for years, and I have no idea who they are because we only hear part of the message as the robot starts talking while our outgoing message is still on.
That said, I really cannot believe the hate here. Our landline is for the internet connection and messages, so telemarketers that call there are ignored and erased - even when a call comes thru when I’m not on the computer I don’t answer the landline because no one I care to talk to calls there. On our cells, we just don’t pick up calls from numbers we don’t have stored and identified. If it’s important, they’ll leave a message. No telemarketer has ever left a message on our cells - if that started happening enough to impact the bill, I might get worked up. Otherwise, just don’t answer the stupid phone if you don’t recognize the number.
To those of you who resent that telemarketers are “invading our homes” or whatever, I don’t get why that is such a big deal, but junk mail and spam email aren’t? I hate those two more than telemarketers, as I resent the dead trees and having to sort junk mail, and I really resent having to check my spam filter every day before dumping it, to make sure it really is all spam. At least telemarketers (as far as I know) are not trying to sell you something obscene…
Dropzone, you have my sympathy. I first telemarketed at a University I was attending, calling alumni. Then I tried it again for some meat/freezer company where the only people we’d hang up on were single people because they couldn’t do six months worth of meat.
Next was a part-timer selling credit cards WITH an annual fee of 25 bucks. I got one yes per week. Then when they get it in the mail, they decline it. I also remember (this was, like 1991) where the call lists were supposedly auctioned for high prices, but I still call that bullshit.
When I get any type of telemarketer, I politely cut them off, say I’m unemployed and can’t afford it, then I wish you the best and hang up. My first reaction to any telmarketing is feeling bad for the employee. Never malice. I did complain only once for Rent-A-Center who called 4 times a day. I asked for the supervisor and was taken off the call list without swearing. I knew from my experience that if I ever got an asshole on the line, I could hit the “call back” button and someone else in the company would get their chance. And an earful.
Memo to dropzone: Telemarketers have found my office phone # and disturb me while I’m working. It is not an option to turn off the ringer. Physicians and others need to contact me about pending cases for the sake of patient care. Sure, I can and do ignore calls coming in from Las Vegas, California and Orlando, but the ringing interrupts the work I do that requires close concentration, so I feel justified in picking up the phone and immediately dropping it back onto the cradle, whether or not that irritates any live persons making their living trying to sell me useless shit.
See folks. This is what being a prick is all about. If people complain to you about your being a prick you just give them a list of instructions on how they should adjust their lives around your prickishness. It just never occurs to them that the solution is for them to STOP BEING A PRICK!
When my husband is out of town, this is exactly what I do. However, he’s on call when he’s in town, and they are much more likely to call his landline than his cell. Due to the security measures in place at his job, the number will come up as “unknown” on any civilian phone line. He MUST be able to be reached by phone, it’s part of his jobs, lives are at stake. Personally, I think that the FAA should give him a separate cell phone and number (and pay for it) so they can reach him (he can resolve some problems by phone), but they didn’t consult me.
I’ve turned the ringer off of my CELL, because the guy who had the number previously had signed up for all kinds of “contests” which are actually just methods of harvesting phone numbers. He was also a deadbeat. My brother, my sister, my husband and the SDMB staff have the cell phone number, and they all know that I never answer it. I rarely even check it. I have the cell so that I can call if I have an emergency on the road, because there are almost no public phones any longer. I still get a lot of telemarketing calls to my cell number, but since they don’t ring, I just delete any calls that I don’t recognize every week or so. Anyone who actually knows me knows to either ring the landline or email me if they need to get in touch with me, unless I’m on the road.
Legally, they have the right to call me, yes. And legally, I have the right to terminate the business relationship. If part of the relationship means that they are gonna telemarket to me, then I’m gonna quit doing business. And I give them exactly 7 calendar days to do this. I don’t care if they start sputtering that it might take a while to go through the system, because I know that if they want to, they can pull my name out of the system much earlier if they really, really want to. Generally I won’t ask the telemarketer to do this, though, other than say “Put me on your do not call list”, instead, I will call up the company HQ. I did this with the pharmacy I use. I asked them to consider this…do they want to continue calling me for a couple of months, or do they want to keep me as a customer? Since I spend well over $500 a month at the pharmacy just in copays, they decided that they could, indeed, expedite my request to be put on the DNC list.
Just because it’s legal to do something doesn’t mean that it’s right, or that it makes good business sense. As I stated earlier, I’ve quit going to a couple of shops that felt that they could call me up because they KNEW that I’d want to know about that great sale that they’re having this weekend. Nope. Maybe they did get in some customers, but they definitely lost me as a customer.
Look, dropzone, if this truly is the only job available, and you’re happy to be back in the work force, well, good for you. I’m not going to wish you ill. However, I’m also not going to say that I don’t hate telemarketing, that I find it sleazy, annoying, and I think it should be illegal.
And I should not HAVE to turn off my phone just to avoid being harassed. There may be an emergency, my father may be called for work, etc.
It’s your insistance that we have a duty to put up with you, that we are the ones who need to find away around being called, despite the fact that there are times we cannot avoid answering “Unavailable” calls. We cannot always “turn off the ringer”.
And my comment about welfare was mostly directed at OMG, who brought it up in the first place, when he said those were sometimes the only options.
Lynn, have you ever considered asking your cell company to give you a new phone number? Then you will be able to use it. Beats paying for something you rarely use. However, I agree completely about the length of time it takes to get off the DNC list. Attention programmers: It takes only one lousy line of code to change the flag from “Okay to call” to “Not okay.”
curlcoat, you make a good point about my lack of experience with the most rabid telemarketers. I got sick of flushing out my voicemail because Comcast made me listen to each message in its entirety before I could delete it, so I just let my mailbox fill up and check the recent call list for familiar numbers, if I feel like it. It pisses off my MIL and SsIL because Wife doesn’t use a cell phone or check her email and I never gave them my cell number, so that is a bonus!
Jackmannii, isn’t that why you have a receptionist? “Oh, I’m sorry. Doctor is with a patient,” and all. It’s a game I play several times a day. And if you don’t have one, get one. They are useful to have around.
RaftPeople, a landline is good for emergencies, like calling 911 or your cell phone when you misplace it.
Would you kindly knock it off with the bumptious “I’m on your side” joviality, durpzone? You may think you are one of the “good” telemarketers, but at least saying “Fuck you, I’m a nuisance” would have the virtue of honesty. Your obnoxious bonhomie while you insist that all people need to do to avoid your calls is either not use their phone the way they pay to do, or to jump through hoops to avoid you, that makes you the fucking problem and not the solution, you piddling little quibbledick.
Actually, you have a personal duty to deal with my calls in some way because they annoy you but they are not going to stop unless you do something about it. What I am doing is not illegal, no matter how much you wish it were, and you allowed me to call you when you signed the contract, whether or not you read the contract. The asshole in me says, “Didn’t want the calls? Shouldn’t have signed the contract,” but in reality I try to make the experience as quick and pleasant as I can because I don’t like telemarketing calls, either. But remember that I’m one of the [del]good[/del] less-bad guys and I will bend over backwards to help you AND your neighbor who just bought my product because he believes it might help his small business. Those other telemarketers might be criminals and it is your duty to society to use your mad internet, phone, and people skillz to do as much as you can to catch and stop them. You have the evidence–their call–and the police and FCC need evidence of wrongdoing to do their job.
And as for the whole “invading your home is the sole province of telemarketers, rapists, and burglars” meme, I assume the people who repeat it have never encountered the Fuller Brush man, the Mary Kay or Avon lady, the vacuum cleaner salesman, the encyclopedia salesman, the Girl Scout cookie salesgirl, the guy selling magazines to pay for his college, the collector for UNICEF or other charities, the kid selling baseball candy, the guy who wants to save you money on energy, or any other door-to-door salesman. And none of you have compared them to pederasts or fecal matter. At least you don’t have to put on pants to answer the phone.
Getting a new phone number means that quite likely I’ll be assigned someone else’s old number. I’ll still have to put up with someone else’s calls. I had to change phone numbers (between the land line and the cell phones) three times a couple of years ago. There are no new phone numbers, just recycled older ones. And getting a new phone number wouldn’t stop the robodials, now, would it?
I answer the door wearing my panties, glasses, and flipflops. And carrying a gun. This is ESPECIALLY effective when the church a couple of doors down has marked my house as a family of Unbelievers who must be Brought To Jesus. I will put on a housedress if I determine that the person at the door is someone that I actually want to interact with. The person who’s gonna fix my internet connection? Come on in, happy to see you, can I get you some iced tea or a soda? The person who has made an appointment? Yeah, I’m awake and dressed.
I think that I have a right to be left alone. I don’t think that anyone else has a right to bother me, just to pursue their own agenda. Now, if a cop comes ringing my doorbell in an official capacity, then I’ll be polite and co-operative. But the cop isn’t trying to sell me something.
If I want to buy something, I know where I can get it, or I can find out where to get it. This isn’t the 1940s, when one car households were the norm, and it made sense for salespeople to travel from door to door. Mary Kay and Avon leave booklets, they don’t bother me. Of course, I don’t wear makeup, so they’re wasting their booklets, but at least they aren’t waking me up.
