This is sort of half MPSIMS, a quarter GQ, and a quarter IMHO, but I am sort of interested in feedback, so I’ll stick it here.
Background - I’m half Serbian and anyone who has ever corresponded by e-mail with me will notice I have a slavic last name.
Incident - So I’m sitting at home this morning, perusing the net, when I get a phone call on my main line. I answer and a gentlemen instantly hits me with a flood of some slavic language, in which the only discernable word to me is my last name ( my father was raised bilingual in English and Serbo-Croation and speaks fair Russian, but I do not ). So I just respond, “Yes, I’m Mr. Whoosit”, and he asks me in heavily accented but clear English, if I speak “Yugoslavian”. I respond that I’m afraid I don’t and he then goes into a spiel about an international calling plan, mentioning some firm I’ve never even remotely heard of and have already forgotten the name of ( but considering the number of those floating around, it might not be some fly-by-nighter - I just don’t know ). I politely decline his offer ( without getting any details ) and he politely lets me go ( the tone of his voice seemed to indicate quite a bit of disappointment when I said I didn’t speak Yugoslavian ). “Weird”, I think to myself.
So, my question is - Anybody ever heard of such a thing? Was this some sort of ripoff, designed to lure Yugoslav immigrants into some complex phone scam? Or is this just a new sales tactic of mining names and trying to hit them with an ethnically directed, but honest, sales pitch? I found the whole thing slightly surreal, though perhaps on reflection I shouldn’t have.
I am Croatian, as are my parents, suprisingly enough. They got a similiar call, as did a few people at our church (predominately Croat). One of the people from church identified the language of the caller as Polish, which sounds ‘familiar’ to me, but I can only understand a few words of it.
The consensus is that someone thinks that Ignorant Boat People, not having a long-distance calling plan, will gladly line up to buy overpriced international calling cards. Since we all miss our goats back in the old country, and are not learned in the ways of ‘looking at two numbers and seeing that one is larger then the other’, we will scarf up these overpriced cards, spending every last dinar and drachma we have for them.
I guess that targeting immigrants for international calling cards is not that uncommon. Targeting upper-middle class immigrants strikes me as silly, but hey. Free country and all that.
Well, I’ve heard of ethnically-directed phone solicitations before, but this one was a bit different. A Polish friend of mine got invited to a focus group, where the participants, all first-generation immigrants, viewed proposed TV ads for international long-distance service and gave their feedback on whether the ads made sense from a cultural standpoint. My friend didn’t mind; I think they paid her $150 cash for an hour of schmoozing. That one was totally legit. Was yours a decent deal, even if you weren’t interested, or did it sound like complete B.S.?
Mind if I share my own weirdest phone solicitation? A few years back, I had some pretty hardcore leg surgery. One night, I came home very sore from physical therapy with my new cane, and was promptly solicited by a nearby cemetery, who was trying to interest me in “pre-need planning.” Fer chrissakes, I may have been walking with a cane, but I was only 28! The telemarketer couldn’t stop cracking up; I have no idea how I got on their list. I sure felt old after that, though.
(BTW, prepaid calling cards can be a great deal; I’ve used them to call a friend in England, and it’s cheaper than calling Indiana from Illinois.)
Telemarketers do the ethnic thing all the time. Mrs. P is constantly being solicited by Spanish speaking TMs due to her last name even though she’s Filipino.
Are you implying that all you “four-ners” are using your calling cards to phone your goats? Well, then, thank God I’m an “Amuriken”. I don’t wanna talk to no damn goats, so these telemarketers best not be callin’ me!
Thanks for the input :). So still no definitive decision on whether it was a scam of not, but at least it has happened to other folks.
Eva Luna - Nah, no details. I never let telemarketers get into details, even if I decide to play with them a bit ( about one in ten - I have to be in the mood ). It didn’t strike me to consider the slight weirdness of it all and wonder about the details until after I was off the phone.
When we were stationed in Japan, my mother used to call me once a week. One day she answered a call and was greeted by someone speaking rapid Japanese. When my mother was able to inform the caller that she did not speak Japanese, the caller was very surprised, given that she called Japan so much!
Apparently, the phone company decided to offer her some sort of special “deal” given her calling habits, and just assumed she was Japanese.
I have a spanish last name and get those kinds of calls all the time. Funny thing is that the calling plan I get offered has changed depending on where I was living at the time. In Miami I got offers to call Cuba (really complex setup too, routing through Canada IIRC), in Orlando I get offers for calling Puerto Rico, and in Chicago I got calls for calling Mexico.
Wouldn’t suprise me in the least. We have received junk mail from the phone company written in Portuguese, with all kinds of local (to Brazil) references. Obviously, they mined our calling habits. Nevertheless, it was interesting to read the targeted junk mail.
It actually seems like a pretty good idea (if such a phrase can ever be applied to telemarketing).
A far cry from taking advantage of people, I feel this allows non-English speakers the opportunity to hear the pitch and respond in their mother tongue, fully understanding the subject. Isn’t this better than preying on someone’s limited grasp of English?
Well, then, thank God I’m an “Amuriken”. I don’t wanna talk to no damn goats, so these telemarketers best not be callin’ me!