On your marks... get set... flame me! I don't mind telemarketers!

The BBQ Pit
1

So my phone just rang. I picked it up and said ‘Hello.’

“Hello?” (me)
“Hello?” (staticy, almost inaudible)
“Hello?” (me again)
“Hi, how are you today?” (aha! cute female voice… ok… i’m in.)
“I’m pretty good, how are you?”
“I’m good–” (she evinces surprise-- they are always surprised by this) “Thanks for asking!”
(pause)
(she starts up again: ) “My name is Stacy, and I’m calling for MCI and Southwest airlines. Do you fly Southwest when you travel?”
“Actually, I do like Southwest a lot. I was happy when they started flying to Hartford, where I go to school.”
“Well… ok, good. Today I’d like to give you 4 more Something Points,” (I forget what they were really called) “and give you the opportunity to gain Something Points when you use long distance as well as when you fly.”
“So, you’re trying to sell me long distance?”
“Well, actually, I want to give you… Well, actually, yeah, I am.” (giggle)
“Ok, well thank you, but I’m happy with my long distance carrier.”
“Oh, do you know how much you pay?”
“Yes I do, and I’m happy with it. But thank you.”
“I can give you x rate with MCI–”
“No thank you. But thank you for calling.”
“Ok, no problem.”
“Have a great day!” (sincere)
“Thanks, you too!”

And that was it. I was nice to someone who has a shitty job and endures rudeness all day long, and it took less than a minute of my time. I’ll admit that there are drawbacks to their existence-- the rude ones are quite obnoxious. Even Stacy brushed off my polite refusal twice, but I have found that most telemarketers respond quite well to patient and polite denial, and the nice ones are pretty nice about it. If you’re philosophically opposed to people calling you at your place of residence to sell you something, that’s one thing. I’m not, however, and I usually don’t mind the whole deal at all.

So, I don’t mean to jumpstart a whole “telemarketers suck” party, I was kind of looking to see if anyone else besides me sees the other side of it-- that these devils are actually real people. I did post this in the pit though, so feel free to flame me as a tele-loving, CrunchBerry-eating, TNN-watching butt bandit. Or whatever.

2

Crunch Berries?

3

You know… the Cap’n Crunch spinoff. The ones that get soggy, even in milk! Colorful, artificial-flavor laden turds?

4

Mmm. Crunch Berries. I used to eat them until the roof of my mouth felt like raw hamburger.

One question: how many telemarketers call you in a day? I get between four and five. Which may be one reason I’m not nearly as polite with these people as you are. Actually, I’ve been using telemarketers as field-tests for Jarbabyj’s insults. The results of my tests are far from complete, but the Pentagon has already expressed a tentative interest.

5

After having several discussions with people who’ve done telemarketing, I try to be friendly, polite, and get them the hell off my phone. They usually have quotas to fill, and it’s a thankless job. The people to go after would be the companies who decide telemarketing is the way to go, not the poor slaves at the bottom of the ladder.

I even wished one luck on her next call last week. She sounded REALLY surprised. I’m going to have to try that again sometime.

I do understand the urge to be rude, and used to be myself. But trust me, those jobs are AWFUL.

6

I used to be nice to telemarketers, but lately they’ve been calling me over and over all day long with their automatic dialing machines that leave a lot of blank messages on my voice mail. The last time I asked one to stop calling me, she got all insulting and sarcastic.

Now, why the fuck would I want to be polite to parasites like that?

You know how your phone will ring, and when you answer it there’s a long pause before someone starts talking? That rude trait of telemarketers is caused by their automatic dialing machines. The automatic dialing machines call several people at a time, then hang up on all of them except the first one to answer, and transfer the one that answers to a salesperson. So they’re basically dialing numbers at random and either hanging up or being rude to whoever answers or leaving a blank message on their voice mail. Thanks to their machines they can do this to thousands of people a day! How the fuck do parasites like that expect anyone to be polite to them?

I find it amusing to keep a Bible next to my phone and pick it up and start reading at random to telemarketers. No matter how polite I am about it, they all hang up immediately without even saying goodbye!

7

Telemarketers, you say? I’m gonna call ‘em what they are–teleTRESPASSERS. I work late at night, so I have to sleep during the day. It’s a pain in the arse to have teletrespassers waking me up. Teletrespassing is actually worse than spamming–at least spammers let me fuckin’ SLEEP, for cryin’ out loud!

MCI sucks off dead dog dong. Their teletrespassers won’t LEAVE ME THE FUCK ALONE!

Look, I don’t blame the actual caller. I blame the fuckmeats who run those places. The phrase “I’m not interested, thanks” DOES NOT mean “Tell me more”.

I say we take all those subhuman corporate cocksuckers who do teletrespassing, put 'em all on a little island, then drop a tactical nuke on it!

8

whew, for a second there, I was afraid this thread was going to be SERIOUSLY hijacked.

Really, though, I hate Crunch Berries. HATE em.

I agree, the auto-dialing thing sucks ass. And those companies suck ass-- the fact that they press the people that work for them not to take “I’m not interested” as a sufficient answer sucks ass. But they’re still human… I don’t know. Just sometimes I like to try to make someone feel good who always gets shit from people for working a shitty job.

That said, MCI execs are tele-loving, CrunchBerry-eating, TNN-watching butt bandits. THanks.

9

I’ve always been riddled with guilt for hanging up on telemarketers myself. That being said, I once heard (not sure if this is true or not) that for many telemarketing companies a person has to refuse three times before they are allowed to hang up and quit giving them the sales pitch. (I’m wondering if this might have been why in the OP the polite refusal was brushed off twice?) Once I decided to test this theory on a telemarketer, so when they called, a few seconds into their sales pitch I interrupted them and said something like, “I’ve heard that you often have to refuse an offer three times before you are allowed to hang up, so let me just say no thank you, no thank you, and no thank you.” I heard them laughing as they hung up. Still gets rid of them quickly, and gives them a laugh.

That said, I now have an urge to find the phone numbers of the corporate types who engage in telemarketing as a sales tool and call them at odd hours not so politely.

10

So, which shows on TNN are you watching, exactly?

11

Any telemarketer who calls my house better hope I answer the phone before my wife picks it up. I try to be polite, but if that doesn’t work I’ll give her the phone if they don’t take the hint. I think she has sent some of the ones she talked to into therapy. The phone is hot to the touch after she gets done. Not too many repeat calls. Guess we get on the “Scalding Bitch” list and they don’t want to call back.

Since this is the Pit, they can all take a flying rat-fuck.

12

I disagree. I do both. I support groups that lobby to make telespamming illegal, I write my congresspeople, and I don’t buy telespammer’s products. That’s attacking the top of the ladder.

However, every time I make a telespammer’s job a little more miserable, a little more unpleasant, a little less enjoyable, the more I increase the chances that they’ll quit. The quicker they quit, the more the top-level people are forced to hire new employees and waste a week training them. Quick employee turnover kills call-centers.

Plus, in the long run, I’m helping the telespammer. There are always other jobs, which don’t involve harassing people or forcing people to spend money to avoid them.

I’m polite with everyone else. But I refuse to be polite to cretins who I have to pay to avoid.

Fenris

13

Whatever works for you, Fenris. I completely agree that telemarketing is slimy, underhanded, and rude. I usually get one or two calls a day, which isn’t all that many but it really pisses me off. I’ve tried telling them to put me on their do-not-call lists, which seemed to decrease the frequency somewhat, but they’ve increased recently.

Everybody I’ve talked to who has done this job has HATED it and felt awful about it, but they have also needed to eat. The only good thing about it is that you can walk into most places, and be hired. The wages suck, the job sucks, but if you’ve got kids to feed it’s better than nothing, at least until you can find a better job.

Go after the bastards at the top, I say…

14

I bet I could sell it for some good hard cash to the list people out there. “Hey, get this, a guy that gets off on telemarketers…”

15

I enjoy telemarketers too, for the same reason I enjoy the Jehovahs, the Mormons and the rest of them that have an irresistable urge to convert me to something. I like having long discussions with them, answering strangely, really making them work at what they are doing. Saying no and hanging up/closing the door is easy. Milking them out for as much time as possible before saying no is much more enjoyable. I know it’s not nice, but neither is calling me when I have an unlisted number. Trying to get them to tell you how they got your number (from a list) and trying to be transferred to the person that gave them that list is fun too.

16

Privacy Manager is worth every penny. Not ONE telemarketer since I let the Ameritech telemarketer sell it to me. :wink:

17

Since the person calling is at the bottom of the chain, I see no reason to be rude to that person. He/She probably is just trying to earn a paycheck till something better comes along. And since telemarketing jobs are so easy to get and others aren’t, well…

I get 'em off the phone in less than a minute with the following:

Me: Hello?
tm: Hi, is this Ms. X?
me: No, she’s not in right now.
tm: Is her SO there?
me: No, she doesn’t have one.
tm: I’ll call back later.

Or, this takes five seconds:

Me: Hello?
tm: Hi, is this Ms. X?
me: There is no one here by that name.
tm: Oh,… okay.

At least this is a different conversation from the usual:
“Hey, is K (my daughter) there?” “No” (What self-respecting 17y old w/license ever is?) I only get about a dozen of these a day. Of course, she is home occasionally :slight_smile: :rolleyes:.

Oh ho! Before I was able to submit this, the phone rang and guess who it was! You get three guesses and the first two don’t count. I said the ‘there’s noone here by that name’ line and she said “Okay, thank you.” End of conversation, five seconds, no rudeness, she’s done her job and I’m off the hook, till the next call.

18

I dunno, I think that I would go into cesspool polishing before I chose telemarketing as a profession. I wouldn’t feel so dirty at the end of the day.

Even though I think that telemarketers (at the corporate level, if not at the level of the unskilled employee) are the scum of the earth, it goes against my upbringing to be intentionally rude to someone without provocation. A typical telemarketing call begins something like this:

(Pick up phone. Say “Hello” two or three times while the damned auto-dialer decides whether or not I am the lucky recipient of this call.)

“Is this Mrs. Totally-Mangled-Pronounciation-of-a-Relatively-Simple-Name?” This, or the use of my formal first name (as opposed to the name I typically go by) is my clue that this is not someone I want to speak with.

“May I ask who is calling?”

At this point, they usually respond with either “This is Joe-Bob from XYZ Plumbing,” or “This is a courtesy call from the Butt-Munch Corporation.” At this point, I have clearly identified that this is no one I want to talk to. In order to minimize both their wasted time and my own, I give them my canned response: “I’m sorry, I don’t respond to telephone solicitations. Please place our number on your ‘Do Not Call’ list.” I do NOT hang up on them.

Perhaps 10% of the time, I get what I consider the correct response — they ask me to verify my name and number, and that I want off their list, and tell me that they will do so. Perhaps 10% of the time, I get an apology for having been disturbed. About 30% of the time, the jerk tries to tell me “I’m not trying to sell you anything.” 50% of the time, the SOB’s hang up on ME. This is a friggin’ COURTESY call?

The last time some twit hung up on me, I just happened to remember his name and the company he was calling from. I pulled out the phone book, and called the corporate offices and related (in a calm and rational voice) what had happened. I told them that it was a pretty terrible representation of their corporation for their people to be making unsolicited phone calls to people during the dinner hour, and when they were politely asked not to call, to then slam the phone down in their ears. Do I feel bad if I got him fired? Nope. He was getting paid for that phone call, and I was not. I treated him courteously, and he treated me rudely in return.

This is the issue that bugs me the most. I do not mind advertising on TV. It helps to pay for the entertainment shows I want to watch. I do not mind magazine ads (except the damned loose cards that fall out all over the place, and the smelly perfume ads) because they reduce the price I pay for the magazine. Though I don’t like junk mail, it doesn’t take me much effort to throw it into the trash, and it doesn’t increase my postal rates (in fact, I hope that the bulk mail rates are designed to help subsidize first class service at least to some extent.) But I PAY for my telephone service for my own convenience. I want to be able to call people when I wish, and to have people I wish to talk with be able to call me. I do not pay for this service to have some cretin who can’t even read a common name correctly hound me to buy some crap that I don’t want.

If our legislators had any cojones whatsoever, they would ban the use of automatic dialers for telemarketing purposes. They harass individuals needlessly. Of course, the sorry corporate telemarketers would boo-hoo about how this would raise their costs astronomically, and destroy their industry, which would be bad for the economy, not to mention their ability to make campaign contributions…

And let me conclude this with a hearty FUCK YOU! to MCI, for allowing their damned automatic dialer to call me more than 20 times in a four hour period on the day before my Master’s thesis was due. The phone would ring and ring, until I went to pick it up, only to find dead air. When I finally got a real person after four hours of this, I was ready to kill. (But, I never got any phone calls from MCI after that.) And let me second that FUCK YOU! for the sorry bastard at Southern Foods who forgot to turn off the telemarketing machine (with an automated recording) over the weekend, which resulted in me receiving their charming recorded message twice, at roughly 1 AM and 4 AM on a Sunday morning. (Which was actually pretty traumatic as well as irritating, since when I get a call in the middle of the night, I automatically assume it is someone calling to tell me that someone has died.)

The scary part is, this was 10 years ago, and I am still bitter after all these years…

19

I used to say, “I’m not interested,” and wait for them to acknowledge me. Now, once I figure out that they are a telemarketer, I say, “I’m not interested. Goodbye.” --click-- all in one motion. It works wonders. If they can’t respect my decision to not talk to them, then they don’t get the polite send off.

Although, on occasion, I will talk to a telemarketer, just for fun. But only if they sound friendly.

20

I wouldn’t mind telemarketers if they didn’t call so damned early…I’m a late night peron, and after going to bed at 5 am, I don’t want to be awakened to some guy who completely hases up my German last name…especially since I’m not even the one they’re looking for! “My mommy told me not to talk to strangers…” usually works pretty good…