So I’m sitting here at my desk at work when the phone rings. (Our Admin Asst. just quit, so we are all sharing phone answering duties.)
Me: [Standard business greeting]
Caller: “Good morning, this is [some marketing shill]. How are you today?”
Me (flatly): “Fine. How are you?”
Caller (very enthusiastically): “I’m doing wonderful! Thank you so much for asking! That’s so nice of you!”
Me: “Umm…”
The woman then launches into this pitch that they are calling men at their workplaces ( :dubious: ) so as to give them free subscriptions to magazines so long as they promise to pass them on to other people, because, you know, magazine publishers make their money from advertising, and the more people who see the ads, the better.
As soon as she pauses for breath, I say: “Thanks for calling, but I’m not really interested–” [CLICK–phone goes dead.]
Me: “???”
What the hell?! You know, telemarketers get upset when people hang up on them. I generally thank for them for calling before declining their pitch (especially if I’m at the office and representing my company). Maybe I should just start hanging up on them first.
Also, what the heck is up with this pitch? (I suspect a subscription fee kicks in after some period of time. Maybe they start sending invoices to my place of business. :eek: )
I get two varieties of telemarketers calling me at work. We’re a not-for-profit, so it really irks me as we barely have money for pens.
One is the Albany Times Union. The TU people are really nice, but their telelmarketers SUCK EGGS. They call us on every line, 1-10, and give us their spiel. I tell them someone’s just called me. And they’re rude. And they get angry if I tell them I don’t want any. (For this exact reason, I don’t get the TU at my house. Attitude like that?) With slow diligence and patience, I’ve finally got them to take off all but 1-2 lines. Soon as I figure out which two are left, I’ll get them off too. And no, you can’t just send a list, apparently.
The other type is everybody else…and again, we’re poor so no money. And I tell them this, and they still insist on pushing. And I tell them we don’t have any say; it all gets decided by Regional, and they still push. So I hang up.
The third type of call, (non-telemarketing) most annoying, is Telecheck callers. Wal-Mart has this policy where if your checks gets declined they print it on a receipt with a phone # to call. The phone # is our 1-800 #! So quite often, especially around holidays, I get someone with a Southern accent calling and complaining their check was declined. Some are really nice, but some can’t get the idea through their thick heads that I can’t help them! They start yelling at me, as if I declined their check. I try to explain, but sometimes I just have to hang up. Some of them are really really old, so I end up shouting into the phone, “THIS IS NOT TELECHECK! THIS IS A NOT-FOR-PROFIT! YOU HAVE TO CALL WAL-MART TO GET THE NUMBER!” amongst giggles from the rest of the staff.
The newspapers are easy. I just tell them I already have a subscription. What are they going to do, call me a liar?
I’ve gotten one call at work, and I phoned the “Do Not Call” people and the woman defended it, saying they had no idea if the number they were calling was a residential or business line. I was taken off their list, though.
Toner pirates are fun…the people who call up, wanting to know the make and model of your printer? I usually send them to our office manager, who likes to mess with their heads. One of these days I’m going to respond, “Our printer is a Classico Prizmatic. It was custom made for us in Italy, prints 75 pages a minute in 5000 colors, including MacKenzie plaid.”
Pitney Bowes used to call us EVERY DAY. No matter how often I told them our monthly outgoing mail can be covered by a book of stamps, they continued to call and call and call. They either finally got the message or they’re giving us a breather.
There are a lot of others, too. Now, as soon as I have a clue, I ask, “Is this a sales call?” That usually takes the wind out of their sails. Sometimes I have to say, “I am hanging up now.”
What’s with this loooooong pause before some of these folks start speaking? If I can see by the in-phone caller ID that I’ve got a connection, I don’t usually have to say ‘Hello’ several times. If you’re going to call and annoy me, PAY ATTENTION!
As an information technology type, I get a LOT of calls from companies doing surveys on our organization’s use of technology. I generally get two or three a week, but I have seen five or six in a single DAY before.
I now have a blanket policy. As soon as I recognize that it is a survey call (generally I can tell within a second or two), I ask: “Is this a survey call?”, and if the answer is “yes”, I respond that I am sorry, but I no longer participate in surveys.
If I got up on the right side of bed, I explain that the number of survey calls have required me to implement this as a policy.
If I got up on the wrong side of bed, I just hang up.
I’ve never had one of those, but if I do, I’ll them I have a Star NX-1000 Rainbow. I think that that is close, if not exactly, what we used to have in the house. I’d tell them the number of the old Epson dot-matrix printer instead, but I can’t remember it.
It’s my understanding that the pause is due to how their equipment works. The bigger outfits use automatic dialers which are programmed to recognize if there’s an actual live voice on the other end. If not, it goes to the next number but if it does recognize an actual live voice, there’s a pause as the equipment turns over to the next telemarketer who isn’t already busy.
FTR: I was a telemarketer at a mom & pop home improvement company for about two weeks. We didn’t have any fancy automated system.
You think you had it bad? Back when I was a telemarketer, we didn’t have phones! We just had to stick our head out the window and yell. And we liked it that way! <grumbles> Kids these days, with their fancy phones</grumbles>
I had one call just today…PCI or something. Wanted to give me free gas for a month. No charge, no buying, nothing, just free gas. So I asked how does his company make money just giving gas away for free? He said “Well what we do is send you a magazine that you can buy…” <click>
Luxury.
We 'ad to call on each potential customer, walking barefoot through the snow, uphill in all directions, and if the client would only agree to buy after we allowed 'im to trase us with a broken bottle, we were lucky!
What the hell! What telemarketer gets upset at a simple hang up?!?! Speaking as a former telemarketer, the hang ups were a blessing. If you hear a no thank you followed by the hang up, you struck gold! The only thing I hated was the 5 minutes of screaming and swearing. Don’t tell me I’m wasting your time when you are choosing to waste it.
And if you are gonna come up with a “mess with his mind” thing, make it original. Break up my day. Make me laugh…
