Memorandum

The BBQ Pit
1

To: My Fellow Americans
Date: 11/7/02
Subject: Telemarketers

My Fellow Americans:

Complaining about telemarketers has become a new national pastime. Everyone hates them, or claims to hate them. We blame them for interrupting meals, conversations, sex. We curse the way they break our concentration during difficult bowel movements. We call them names, rain abuse down upon their heads, and trade stories about clever insults and methods to foil them. But we accept them as a necessary evil, not realizing that the fault for their existence lies with us.

It is time to introduce a radical notion:

STOP BUYING STUFF OVER THE PHONE. You can stop telemarketers in their tracks, simply by refusing to buy products, give money, or take stupid fucking surveys over the phone. “I don’t accept phone solicitations.” “No.” “Put me on your ‘do not call list’.”

Intelligent people know this, and wield these phrases interchangeably and automatically. But we still get telemarketing calls because the rest of you fucking morons outnumber us. We’ve accepted the fact that you continue to outbreed us, but throw us this one bone: Telemarketers stay in business because asshats like you give into their sales pitches, and they make money. If you stop buying stuff, ANY STUFF, or giving money, ANY MONEY, over the phone, then this wouldn’t happen, because they’d all go broke and go back to sending us junk mail instead.

When people solicit your money over the phone, you have no idea if they are really who they say they are. They could be anyone with a credit card machine. The money could go to charity, the money could go to the individual telemarketer’s People Are Dumb, Let’s Go On A Nice Vacation Fund, and you would have absolutely no way of knowing. Do you really want to be giving out personal information and your credit card number to people rude enough to interrupt your dinner hour on a daily basis? There is an entire industry designed to part fools and their money, and it will crumble and die the second you stop acting like fools.

GET IT INTO YOUR HEADS, PEOPLE. There is no cause so worthy, no product so necessary, no survey so fascinating or informative, no deal so fantastic that it must be made, right now, over the phone. I defy you to think of one, ONE SINGLE item or cause, so important that it should be exempted for this rule. The Armless Legless Children of Widowed Firefighters Against Global Warming will just have to fucking send you a motherfucking letter or work a little harder on their grantwriting this year, cappice?

I thank you for your time and attention. If any of the words or phrases I’ve used are puzzling to you, here is the condensed version:

DON’T BUY STUFF OR GIVE PEOPLE MONEY OVER THE PHONE. IT’S BAD.

P.S. PLEASE STOP BREEDING

:smack:

2

Bitter?

3

I’m not sure why it’s bitter to have a valid point and to make sure the people in the back (so to speak) can hear it.

I’m with Mags. I hate’em, she hates’em, even they hate themselves a lot of the time. It’s an entire industry based on fools and we ain’t supposed to suffer’em.

4

I’m not sure that “they” outnumber “us”; what does the sales per volume of calls have to be for businesses to consider this effort worth it?

And I completely agree with you. When a friend of mine who I have a lot of respect for told me he had bought magazines over the phone, I was flabbergasted. I tried to respond diplomatically but my goodness, you’ll never get rid of them now and it only encourages them to keep this up. arg:(

5

I agree completely, of course, but waiting for the masses to fall in line has never really been my forte.

I haven’t had any trouble with telemarketers since I threw my phone in the garbage.

6

Like anything else. It’s worth it as long as the marginal costs of the sales calls (plus the marginal cost to create the good) equals the marginal revenue of the goods sold.

7

Memorandum

To: Magdalene
Date: 11/7/02
Subject: Telemarketers

Mags:

Am enclosing two gross of Ibuprofen. For you, not the wall.
:smiley:

8

Hear! Hear!

I thought once or twice of posting the same rant, to the same people.

To paraphrase Field of Dreams: If you buy it, they will keep annoying your ass!

9

Looked to me like the rant was against those who actually buy stuff from these telemarketers. As I don’t know anybody who does that, nor who has done that, and that mags seems to think people who do so outnumber those who don’t, I don’t know who she’s really pissed at.

So, yeah, I’d say she’s bitter about the few who do.

10

It seems to me that one or two people may see this so may I take this opportunity to interest you in this lovely set of bound encylopedia?

11

OK…I need to confess. My usually smart and sane SO bought something over the phone. He bought one of those community coupon books for $44. I read him the riot act, but he assured me it was Ok and we’d use the coupons.

Ok, so the coupon book comes, and there are a few coupons that I think we might use, and we do. A local sub shop has by one sub sandwich, get one free. I think we used some Dairy Queen and Denny’s coupons too.

But what the coupon company did was give our phone number to every business who had a coupon in that book. I have been called and asked if I want to book a Wisconsin Dells vacation, or set up a Glamour Shot session, or have my (non-existent) children photographed for the holidays. All of these businesses mention that we have the coupon book, so I know it is definitely linked.
So needless to say, we will never, ever do anything like that again.

12

NOW WE KNOW -

It those idiots in Wisconsin who are to blame for encouraging the telemarketing vermin!

Stone them! Stone them!

13

Mr P once made an appointment over the phone to have someone come and talk to us about our roof. He also agreed in principle that we would have a sign advertising their business on our fence for the next million years.

It’s not a mistake he will make again in a hurry. Stern words were had.

14

I and my SO are blessed with a serious lack of hesitance when talking to telemarketers. We have no problems telling them to bug off.

But we, like many others, have much more difficulty dealing with an in-person hard sell.