Meh, that’s nothing. Last year at election time there was a local politician who went around ringing apartment buzzers, inviting himself in for coffee and a chat.
This is my number one gripe. When I tell you I’m not interested, that is never going to change. Trust me on this.
When I say “do not call me again”, I mean it. For all eternity.
It has been mentioned here before that some telescum like to deliberately harrass their victims to see how far they can be pushed. It’s like some sort of perverted game to them. Fine. I’ll play along. I once told a telescummer I hoped she’d died on Christmas morning in front of her children. She started to cry. I hung up in her face.
She or her company never called me again.
I’ve gotten calls from these sleazebags and I can’t hang up on them! The line won’t disconnect until the message is finished.
Ha! I’ve done that, too. The usual response, as soon as I know it’s a telemarketer, is to inform them that if they call me again, I’ll hunt them down and kill them in their own kitchen. They usually get the hint after that. I try to balance my total hatred for the scum with the fact that they offer me a chance for a choice bit of venting every now and then. 
No, that was just fucking cruel. I hope you’re proud of yourself. When I said we would call you again, that was because it was WHAT WE WERE TOLD TO DO. By the people who handed us our checks. I’m sorry that your paranoia caused you to attack someone who was just doing her job, but not every telemarketer is malicious. If someone calls and you hang up, we are told to mark it as a “call later”. Blame the company, not the employees. And don’t give me any asshatted “there were other people who said they were just following orders” because it’s a load of shit. Morality is nice, but it doesn’t always trump needing to be paid. If I didn’t mark the calls as I said, I might lose my job, which I wasn’t going to do just to make you happy.
My psot was in respose to Mr. Blue Sky, but I guess it applies to you too, Silenus.
That’s good advice, and some that we should all follow. It’s the companies that are at the root of this evil. Then again, it’s the pawns at the bottom who come into these threads and try to defend the industry. With some rather twisted logic, I might add. They really shouldn’t be surprised when they bear the brunt of people’s anger.
I was so proud of myself, I made myself a certificate, framed it, and hung it on the wall.
When you call me, you ARE the company. When I ask you not to call me again and you tell me you will not call me again, I actually expect you to keep your word.
Good. I only wish that it were a lot harder, so that nobody would do it.
Then DON’t FUCKING CALL ME.
I tell you not to call me, and you call again a month later, and you think it matters that you’re fucking POLITE? The act of calling is impolite. It doesn’t fucking matter what you say or how nicely you say it.
I’ve tried to find out who the companies were on occasion, but got hung up on before I could finish asking.
Make all the excuses you like. What you said up there is the number one reason why so many of us enjoy tormenting the fuck out of telemarketing scumbags.
We tell you, in no uncertain terms, Don’t call again, and all it means is we will be called later.
Fuck you. You just ensured that the next telemarketing cunt who calls my house hangs up crying. Hope you’re proud of yourself, asshole.
Please telemarketers are never polite. The act of cold calling is not polite.
Quite frankly, if she did nothing more than try to make a sale, and you responded as you did, you were an ass. If, on the other hand, she was persistant and rude, then she deserved what she got.
So it is not their fault because they are told to do something they know is wrong by the person in charge, so they have no choice. Do you guys think it’s time to Godwinize this?
It was the latter. I did not have Caller ID at the time and I was getting 4-5 calls per week from her and her company.
Hmm. Not liking telemarketing is one thing; frothing at the mouth about it is a little creepy. Who was that guy who wanted to axe murder the counter girl at the movies for insulting his manhood? I always think of him when I hear people go way over the top with the telemarketer torture talk. Something about their word choices does imply both a certain entrenched sense of entitlement and a startlingly vicious elitism.
That said, I’ve had some of the most disrespected jobs there are, the real bottom of the barrel, and telemarketing was the worst. I lasted less than a week, it was that unambiguously foul. And I was a professional “psychic” for two years. There was more moral ambiguity in charlatanism than telemarketing. Not everyone, though, as the enormous success of psychic counseling demonstrates, is savvy to moral and ethical issues. Or con artistry.
Those of you defending the rights of the worker to work: I salute your dedication to the cause of labor. The problem is that it’s like defending the right of a nine year old to work in a sweat shop. The workers are getting screwed too. Everybody is getting the shaft except the man at the top.
It’s a lousy racket and it should be shut down. Super-simplifying the issue by declaring everyone at its front lines target practice has no point beyond sadistic glee, however. You don’t get anywhere yelling at people - store clerks, phone drones - who don’t have any power. You know they don’t have any power because they don’t have any money. If they did, they wouldn’t be on the phone with you.
There’s nothing they can do but quit, and there’s an endless class of expendable workers to take their place. Every single telemarketer in the country could quit right now, and they’d all be replaced by the weekend. Does that not suggest to some of you that perhaps the problem is not just with the moral compass of the companies and individuals involved with telemarketing? Economic problems don’t exist in a vaccuum, ever. Very, very few people take jobs to fulfill their supervillain fantasies of selling things to angry, half-naked people first thing in the morning.
You usually can’t yell at the men with power in telemarketing companies, but you can always yell at your representatives, though the Secret Service might take an interest if you get too axe-murdery-guy about it.
Don’t call again for us meant about once a week until we ate the face off a caller.
Nup, being pushy and aggressive helps sales, being polite would mean that when we asked for no more calls, we would have got no more calls.
Besides, I know people who like to ring up and make games of it all :rolleyes:
I’ve seen the inside of some of these places, cramped, over hot or over cold, not that great for a mother to be…
That’s exactly my point. Hell, we got laid off because they moved the jobs to India. I HATED that job, but as I said before, we were just doing as we were told. Untill things change, there will always be telemarketers. I wish there weren’t.
Say you’re an unwed pregnant mother. You can’t get a better job just now for the reason I stated. Someone says “Don’t call again”. Do you do what you KNOW the customer wanted, and get yelled at by the boss, or do you do what the boss wants and piss off the customer?
I wasn’t making excuses. If you’d read my second post, Brain Donor, you’d see I was stating was not something we did to be rude, but what we were supposed to do. And I specifically worded it that way to head off any comparisons to You Know Who. And Hitler, too.
OK, then. Even so, the fact that she cried makes me wonder if she was getting pressure from her boss, and then from you. Sounds like she was in a “Damned if you do, damned if you don’t” position. And I know how much that sucks. Either way, I hope she’s out of that job now.
No. I, too, do what my boss says, and I’m far from a good little Nazi. I do that stuff because I get paid to. If the stuff I was asked to do became morally reprehensible, I’d quit, but not before I’d found another job. Thus, there’d be an overlap time when I’d be doing morally reprehensible stuff. But paying the rent.