I just had a call, at work, from a market research company. I didn’t participate in the survey. Don’t these companies have enough sense **not ** to ring people at work?
No. And I’m EFFING SICK OF IT!
That is all
Golly, your phone number got generated by an auto-dial program. I hope you shot the bastards.
The other day my bank called me at work. Which bank? Yes, it was that bank.
The caller says they are just calling to see how things are going with me and whether there is anything they can help me with. As it happens I do have a bit of an annoyance with my bank at the moment, so I decided against pissing her off quick.
So she starts in on her spiel which was written as if she was giving me some useful advice but was really just a sales pitch for various insurance and financial products. After a bit of this I cut her off and said that I didn’t need any insurance or other financial products, which set her back a bit and there was a bit of a pause while she figured out what came next in the script.
The next bit of the script was “is there anything else I can help you with?” which was of course my cue to launch into my little problem.
Things got frosty at this point. I’d barely begun before I was told in no uncertain terms that she had no authority to deal with anything to do with my accounts and I’d need to see someone at my branch.
In other words, the opening lines were a complete and utter lie. She wasn’t calling to help me at all and she couldn’t help me at all. She was a salesperson pure and simple, dressing her pitch up in helpful language that her employer no doubt hoped most people would never call upon.
“Which bank” is a question I may be asking myself, shortly.
I actually did this in a week long temp job last summer. I called steel manufacturers throughout the south and midwest. The numbers were purchased from a company that specializes in such things, we even had the plant manager’s name and extension most often.
I especailly apoligize to the guy that screamed “DONT EVER FUCKING CALL HERE AGAIN!” and the guy who cheerfully answered my inane 1 to 5 scale questions at great length for half an hour.
Me neither. I got so tired of these calls, I started telling surveyors that company policy prohibited us from responding.
At least surveyors give up with good grace. Collection agents don’t. (I hate those motherfuckers.)
An automated dialling programme should easily be able to edit out any numbers that it generates that have central CBD prefixes.
And besides which, uninvited sales calls being inherently rude anyway, I don’t see any reason for Cuncator to hold back from pitting these guys, merely because they were slightly more obnoxious than they intended to be.
I don’t know what a “central CBD prefix” is, or how easy it would be to set up the program to skip those numbers. My point being that the poor person (and I mean that literally, I’ve done the phone survey thing and they don’t get paid well at all) who’s making the calls isn’t exactly sitting there choosing what numbers to dial and have no way of knowing that they are reaching you at work.
I hope at the very least you were polite to the person you spoke with.
I also have “a little annoyance” with that bank… as do so many people I know… :mad:
I’ve asked the same question - unfortunately things are now so bad for us customers that the other big banks actually have the same or higher account-keeping fees :smack: …so they know that they can do whatever the fuck they want, and you probably won’t switch banks.
I’m finding it very hard to clear up my “little problem” with Which Bank, as a) they’re only open 9:30 to 4:30 on weekdays and b) if you ring them up, its virtually impossible to get transferred to a branch manager. :rolleyes:
Anyway, that’s my Banks are Bastards rant.
We’ve been there and done this. You can hang about in this thread and get trashed, or you can go to one of the other threads where people have tried to win this argument from your position and get trashed by proxy. It’d save some work if you’d do the latter.
What “argument” is it that I’m trying to win exactly? The “argument” that the wage slave who works a shitty job doesn’t have any control over what numbers pop up on their screens/get auto-dialed? Anyone who’d like to take a contrary position to that is welcome to make themselves look like an idiot by attempting to “trash” me for it.
And I still don’t know what a “central CBD prefix” is, and I think you and the OP are very cruel not to tell me.
No, the argument that a person who decides to take on a job which they know involves being deliberately rude and annoying to people deserves to be politely treated.
[sub]Cruel? Moi?[/sub]
Oh, all right. A “central CBD prefix” is a tautology. Sorry Cunctator.
Otto CBD is Central Business District, or the city centre.
I won’t add an opinion about telemarketers/surveyers because last time I did I severely chewed out by those who never had to take a job they didn’t like just to make a living.
I am curious about why wasting time at work answering a telephone survey is bad, yet wasting time posting about it is ok.
I’m sure the boss wouldn’t be quite so nitpicky.
Awww, calm kiwi you’re spoiling my fun 
And that silly argument you just made about “just making a living” was blown out of the water the last time we did this. Why go over it again?
I’ll tell you why I was sometimes curt with people who called and asked me to complete phone surveys at work. It’s because if I did, my boss would stick his head out of his office and tell me not to waste time with them and, as I got rid of them as quickly as possible without being rude, tell me to stop wasting my time. Yes, he was a lousy boss. I still needed the job and the money.
CJ
“Annoying” I will grant, although personally I’ve never been so annoyed by the time it takes to say I’m not interested in taking the survey that I felt the need to bitch about it. “Rude” I will not grant, unless the OP indicates that the surveyor was in fact rude on the phone. Merely calling someone and asking them to take a phone survey is not by definition rude. Even so, kinda slim excuse not to be polite.
Distribution of phone numbers must be different in Australia and New Zealand than in the states. I don’t think we have CBDs, at least we don’t in any city I’ve ever lived in.
CBD is a geographical term. It is not one specifically relevant to phones.
I didn’t! I realise the force for good is too strong. 