See, I don’t want them calling me, period. My husband and I sleep during the day, but my husband’s job requires him to be reachable by phone when he’s not on vacation or not on his days off. He has been on assignment in Oklahoma City (about a 5 hour drive from here, I don’t know how far it is in miles) and his boss has called him in to fix something that nobody else knows how to deal with. He got lots of brownie points and paid time off for THAT job, let me tell you. In any case, my real point is that once that phone rings, it wakes us up, and then we have a hard time going back to sleep. And it WILL ring when we’re asleep. Even if we hang up on the telemarketers, they’ll call again, and again, and again. Now, if one of my family calls, fine, I’ll go ahead and try to wake up and take the call. If someone from my husband’s shop calls, well, that’s part of his job. But if someone disturbs my sleep for his own benefit, he WILL hear how angry I am about it.
Telemarketing (and its sisters, charity and political spamming by phone) is rude by nature. It involves calling up people who probably don’t want to answer the phone, especially not right THEN, and quite probably interrupting a nap, or a lovemaking session, or just a really good game that the player can’t put on “pause”. Telemarketing will pay pretty good, but that’s because the companies who hire telemarketers expect their spammers to accept some abuse as part of the job. Any telemarketer who expects courtesy when they are rude initially should have their nose rubbed in their mistake. And I intend to do so, every chance I get.
I used to feel that telemarketers deserved courtesty, too. Then I was one for a couple of months, for a couple of different companies. I’ve learned that it’s a sleazy business, and I will discourage its workers whenever I can. I want to make it unprofitable for those companies to market in this way.
Telemarketing, like email spam, bases its business practices on cost shifting. Telemarketers do not subsidize my phone costs, like junk mail does for snail mail. Telemarketers do not give me something of value for listening to their pitches, like TV ads do for the shows I want to watch. Telemarketers use MY resources to market to me, like spam email does. In other words, I pay for them to use my property to market to me, without gaining any benefit. They also demand my immediate attention, because it might be a call from my husband’s job or from my family. Calls from my family or from my husband’s job will show up on Caller ID as “out of area”, by the way. Now, if some telemarketing company would come up with a plan where they’d pay me to listen to a few minutes of commercials, at a time of my choosing, I might be willing to listen. But telemarketing imposes a cost to me in time, energy, and money without compensating me in the slightest.
