Except many corporate exchanges show up as unknown. If your place of work is one of those, odds are you can’t do this if you ever need to be on call. They may have finally been changed, but many schools and hospitals are/were on similar systems, including the nearest emergency room to my house. It can be VERY frustrating when you’re trying to call someone from the nurse’s station and you can’t get them because they don’t answer “unknown” calls. This is a problem that shouldn’t exist, as it was created specifically by telemarketers.
Damn coding!
:: phone clatters into cradle::
Also, I only did it one evening, I sought and found better assignments.
Like begets like. When someone interrupts my work/dinner/movie in order to attempt to sell me something I don’t want, need, or have exhibited any interest in procuring, it is an unquestionable rudeness.
I agree with Miller’s statement exactly: The notion that telemarketers are simply executing a standard, socially accepted business practice in their presumption that the possession of a telephone is equivilent to an interest in their product or service is the offense. I have not and don’t argue that this makes them the equal to despots or mass murderers. I’m not even an unmitigated advocate of laws against the practice, though I think that a registry like the “Do Not Call List” and mandatory penalties for deliberately violating the avowed intention not to accept calls are quite within the bounds of constitutionality and good sense. But it is an insufferable impudence to insist that this behavior is perfectly acceptible and should command “common courtesy” in response. If a neighbor comes over and asks me to not block the drive with the trash can or to invite me to a dinner party then I’ll show her all the common curtesy I can muster. But if a perfect stranger comes to my door, steps inside the living room unbidden, and starts regaling me with a shaggy dog story, he’s going to end up testing the elasticity of his posterior without an apology to be had.
You want respect and common courtesy from me? Go get a real fuckin’ job. I had to.
Stranger
Dear Og I’m multiposting.
Along with the unfortunate event in **Obsidian’s ** family life due to trying to avoid telemarketers, I recall Cervaise saying in “The Telemarketer Speaks…” that his brother was in dire medical condition and the time wasted talking to an unsolicited sales pitch or poll was time that could have been used by someone to update him on his condition.
I am one of the disabled. And I’m a little older than most of you. I don’t sleep regular hours. When I do get sleep, I don’t like having it interrupted.
Telemarketers don’t know when I sleep. They don’t know much of anything really important about me. They certainly didn’t know the night that I needed to keep my line clear for emergency phone calls. One of them called with a recorded message just when I needed to make an emergency call. I had no use of my phone during crucial moments.
That’s been many years, but it has left a bitter taste.
There was another time when a telemarketer threatened me. This was one who had dealt with my account at Time/Warner regularly and it was easy to track him down and report him. I can’t remember if that was before or after I was in the hospital for five weeks with clinical depression. Of course he couldn’t know that. To him, I was just a generic person with no particular problems or personality or special needs.
Telemarketers are not the only ones with needs that should be commiserated with. I’m sorry that you are having a tough time. There are things that I do in my personal life to help people in trouble. But when I am in my home, I am off duty. There has to be a place which is off limits to everyone else and a home is it!
Don’t bug people where they live for your own benefit. That is not an unreasonable rule of life.
Plops down in the Barcalounger with a bag of Cheetos waiting for Cervaisev2.0.
I’ve wedged the phone under my bitch-tit to avoid any interruption.
My big problem with telemarketing is that their industry fought so hard against the opt-out. If they’re just trying to make a living selling to people who, apparently, want to be contacted by telemarketers, then why fight it?
It’s because their industry tends to be predatory – on the mentally incapacited, elderly, lonely, or otherwise vulnerable parts of society. Their might be legitimate people who market by e-mail, but the majority of spammers are borderline illegal or worse.
It’s immoral that companies could be asked “Don’t call me again”, and they’d just sell your name to another company.
It’s immoral to not offer a practical opt-out for marketing that wastes people’s time and energy (until finally strong-armed by the government to implement it against their objections).
Well, if someone comes to your front door to sell you something, you don’t scream obscenities at them, act rudely, blow a bullhorn at them, or like behavior. The appropriate action is to say “Not interested, have a good day” shut the door, and move on.
If the salesman takes it any further than that, then you have a legitimate casus belli and I support whatever you do to get him off your property (as long as it’s nothing illegal.)
That can be a problem. However I have a cell phone which anyone can use to reach me in an emergency, and I’ve never had a telemarketer call my cell phone once in over five years of owning it, and I don’t have any sort of blocking services enabled on the phone.
And I also have an office with people paid to answer the phone and voice mail for when office hours are over if someone needs to contact me in a less than dire business instance. If it’s important I have a second phone line at my home I only give out that only employees and customers know, it’s also never been called by a telemarketer in over 10 years of operation.
I have to wonder how some of you get on so many calling lists.
As an entrepreneur I have to give my phone number out to hundreds of people and the only phone I’ve ever gotten hits from telemarketers on has been my main house line which I sometimes use when registering for various websites or other such things, and even then it wasn’t very common for a telemarketer to call.
I’ve noticed with a lot of telemarketer calls there’s a pause after I pick up and say “Hello?” – must be the automatic dialer system switching the answered call to a live person. So if there isn’t a response to my greeting right away I hang up. If it’s someone I’d want to be talking to they’ll call back. The telemarketers don’t.
The don’t call list is wonderful, it’s cut the crap way down. Now if I get a telemarketing call I stay on just long enough to say “I’m on the do not call list” and then hang up. Ahhhhh… peace and quiet. Which a work-at-home proofreader goddamn NEEDS!
You have an interesting concept of what consent means. And by “interesting,” I mean “stupid.”
Explain to me, please, how harassing people by telephone is “offering” something to society. I fully support the right to people with all sorts of disabilites to work. But if the only job someone is capable of performing is telemarketing, then yes, they’re better off on welfare. That’s why we have it: so that those on the bottom rungs of society can survive without having to resort to unethical or illegal practices. And telemarketing is entirely unethical. It’s not something you do if you have the smallest sliver of consideration for other people.
Not in the face of deliberate discourtesy, no there isn’t.
Don’t tell that to me, tell it to the putz with an autodialer.
So the only time anyone has a right to complain about how someone else is behaving is when that other person if violating the law? How do you explain your posts in this thread, then? Last time I checked, there wasn’t a law against pointing out that telemarketers are assholes.
Well, the one educational thing this thread has offered me is the opportunity to find out what the folks at Barcalounger are up to these days. The absolute hideousness of the photo on their main page was enough to send me, shrieking, away from their site.
That said, I must be some helluva kind of lucky: since I stopped using land lines in June of 2002, I haven’t had a single unsolicited telemarketer call on my cell phone. Apparently such a thing can happen, but I was unaware of that until this thread.
About a year ago, I unthinkingly provided my cell number while purchasing tickets for a couple of concerts at Carnegie Hall, and they still call me once in a while seeking donations or whatever - but I don’t really count that as telemarketing. Since I recognize the area code and prefix on my caller ID, I just don’t pick up, and they leave no message. No harm done.
That’s fine, some of us will move on and be rational, polite human beings. Some people will behave like cave men and neanderthals. I see you prefer the latter, that’s a personal choice. Although I must say it reflects quite badly on you.
Sales is a real job by the way, deal with it.
A sales pitch isn’t discourteous. It has a long history in the United States stretching back to the door-to-door salesman and is in general an accepted practice. Do you also take baseball bats and bullhorns to girl scouts trying to sell cookies?
Never said that.
I had a series of calls from some company whose name appeared on the Caller ID as “Technion Corp”. They claimed to represent my phone company (Bellsouth). I Googled them and it turns out to be a call center in Tampa. I called Bellsouth and they had never heard of the company.
I confronted them the next time they called and told them I would be reporting them to the Do Not Call registry. After the third time I reported them, they stopped.
I can only hope they got fined $11,000 for each call.
It is when it’s done in the privacy of my own home. I am manifestly NOT anti-capitalist by any means, but I believe that we should all have the right to some sanctuary from the incesant consumerism of this country. I do not think it is irrational to expect a little privacy from random sales pitches in the privacy of one’s own home.
I disagree that it was ever an “accepted” practice. From what I’ve read, door-to-door salesmen were just as despised in their day as telemarketers are in ours.
No, because I value my life and limbs. Never fuck with a Girl Scout. They fight dirty.
In point of fact, you said exactly that. Here’s the quote again, in case you’ve already forgotten it:
No one has ever claimed that telemarketing is illegal, or based their complaints about them on the breach of some imagined legislation. So I have to ask, what was the point of this comment, if not to imply that people have no right to complain about actions that are not specifically illegal?
I just found out recently that unless I opted out (which I have), then my credit card company feels perfectly justified in selling my information to companies OUTSIDE of their subsidaries. Had I neglected to read the fine print, or had that letter not reached me, I wouldn’t have known until later, if at all.
I used to get telemarketing calls (not many, but some) on my cellphone in days when I had very few “anytime” minutes, most of which I had used up each billing cycle, so I had to pay for telemarketing calls. I wasn’t exactly rude, but I was abrupt with them, and (after I learned about it) asked them to put me on their “Do Not Call” list.
A company I worked for wanted me to “sell” things by phone to local customers. I refused–I said I would happily talk to them if they came in the office about possible offers they might want, but I was not going to harass them at home about it, especially when said company already HAD telemarketers.
I think that the basic issue is that of privacy. When we’re out and about, in public, we expect to be bombarded by all sorts of things, including commercial solicitations.
Moreover, when we’re out shopping, we expect commercial interventions.
But when we’re home, we expect to be left the Hell alone. That is, the polite default condition regarding the home domain is that we expect to be unmolested, unless we explicitly invite otherwise, or unless some sort of emregency pops up.
Saying that we should screen our calls is a bit like saying that we should fnece our yards in order to keep strangers and their pets from shitting on said yard.
I worked as a telemarketer for a period during June of 2002. I was in my freshman year of college, and my dad was bugging me to get a job. I saw an ad in the paper for a telemarketing company by my parent’s house, and they paid more than minimum wage. I figured, hey, I like talking to people on the phone! They’re contracting with a legitimate, nationally known company! How bad can it be?
Getting insulted was bad. In my entire life, it would never, ever occur to me to be that rude to someone who just called me. That, combined with a few other things that were going on in my life, inspired me to start a Pit thread about the whole thing. (This was back when I A.) still posted regularly, and B.) had confused the term “BBQ Pit” with the term “Livejournal”). During this thread, a number of people attacked me. This included respected posters (and, to be fair, the respected posters weren’t total jerks about it) as well as newer posters.
I made the case that my company was legitimate, and they backed off, while admitting that telemarketers STILL annoyed them.
I think that getting unsolicited phone calls is really fucking annoying. I think that most people are really fucking annoyed by them. I don’t think, however, that most of them say what they post here to actual people on the other end of the phone. God knows that–though insults I did bear–they were not nearly as creative and vitriolic as the ones I’ve heard here. I think it’s just blowing off steam.
And, oh, the job? That ended shortly thereafter. I was chewed out for not making a sale to a guy that didn’t really understand English and was just saying “yes” to everything. As a result, I walked in the middle of my shift. Only time I’ve ever up and quit a job, too.
Unless you’re selling Jesus to [http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=2826351&postcount=18](Master Wang-Ka).
And yes, sorry folks, telemarketers are scum. Unless you post your home phone number here, shut the fuck up. I have more right to not have you call than you have in calling me. Cite one case where a sleaze-bag company was able to win in court against a person that didn’t want to be called. There are plenty of people that have successfully filed claim against shitheels calling them.
Got that? Telemarketers do not have an inherent right to call whoever they wish. Consumers, however, do have a right in demanding “companies” not call them at home.
Listen up dicks. If we want you to call us with sales pitches, we’ll fucking sign up for it. If I want vinyl siding, I’ll call a contractor in my city. Thanks for offering me your minimum-wage service in finding the best contractor from 9 states away for a home improvement gig. I’ll have to slap you in the face with the reality that if I’m going to spend thousands of dollars on the house I come home to every day after working a real job, I want to make sure there were no ass-monkeys involved in the deal.