Snoooooooopy needs a job to feed, clothe and house himself. Don’t blame him for this, as we all do. I’m sure had he the choice, he would have never left his media employment.
There’s a thing called ‘call display’. I have it. If I see someone I don’t want to talk to, or ‘unavailable’, I don’t pick up. It’s pretty simple. If I do inadvertantly pick up, I say ‘no, thank you’ before I hang up. Simple, no?
Yeah, I kind of feel like I should greet you with “Hail, Satan!” or something.
What are you calling for exactly? Five hundred is a big lump of money. My personal best is in the mere $300 range, although I am a fairly green telefundraiser.
sigh I guess this is what happens when you get to market with a better product. My earlier thread, Today’s Telemarketing Rant scooped you, yet there it languishes with fewer replies and barely more views (at the time of typing this shameless plug to revive my thread). I wounded by the assembled SDMB Pitizens. I’ll go cry in my coffee now.
Gary:
This came to be just seconds ago. When the telemarketer calls, they would have to first say, “Greetings. I would like to have a short sales talk with you. First, I must tell you my corporate bank account number and agree to pay you, the owner of the medium I’m using right now to advertise, $X.XX per minute for your time.”
If the telemarketer provides fake bank info, then the telemarketer concerned (I know, that does look like an oxmyoron: “telemarketer concerned”) gets to spend the night in jail.
What do you think?
There’s nothing to dodging these people. Sometimes I answer the phone, sometimes I don’t (I refuse to pay for Caller ID or any other phone company scam to get more money out of me.)
I could really care less what happens regarding my telephone. It is not in charge of my life.
If I happen to get a telemarketer they almost always start with: Hello, is Mr. X there? or Hello, is Mr. or Mrs. X there?
I say No, then I hang up. Real simple. Nothing to it. 10 more seconds of my life watching commercials or some otrher useless activity is over.
When I’m doing something important, I DON’T ANSWER the phone.
How difficult is that? If it’s the hospital calling about your dying father, they’ll LEAVE A MESSAGE!
Once again: The telephone is not my lord and master. Neither should it be yours.
I wanted a sonic device that would hit the proper harmonic - the one that made the anal spincter and bladder both totally relax.
“Hello, Sir. I represent the Nigerian Banking Scam Corpoopration…uhnnn …OH MY GOD!!! :click:”
I’m sure ** Lieu** will have input on that output.
Think the military was working on sonics…
During my brief stint as a telemarketer, I got to hear the Telezapper more than once. If the computers don’t screen it out, it hurts like a bitch. The first time I got one, I ripped my headphones off and swore really, really loudly. I mean…ow.
I dispositioned the numbers as “Do Not Calls,” for the record.
That should be sphincter, asshole…
[Cartman] Don’t call me an asshole, you Son-of-a-bitch! [/Cartman]
Fagjunk Theology: Not just for sodomite propagandists anymore.
An equally low-tech “No!, not just no, but HELL no!!” {{{{click}}}}
Next!
WHen I lived in Phoenix a few years ago, I had a service from the phone company that cost like $3 or $4 a month called “PrivacyPlus”
If a call came in as “anonymous” or “unknown” or “blocked name” or anything like that (which is generally the case with telemarketers…they would receive a recording saying, “Please record your name at the beep…” THEN, and only then, my phone would ring, I would listen to the recorded name, then choose to take the call or reject the call…most of the time, I suppose, telemarketers would not care to spend the time to record their names and wait for me to answer their call.
There was the problem of people like my grandmother who shows up as “unknown” on the CallerID, but with that service, you could establish a code so that those from whom you wanted to receive calls could simply enter this 4-digit code when the recording starts and they could bypass it.
It seemed to work for me. I rarely received a call from a telemarketer. And because this technology was available from the phone company, I failed to see the relevance of devices like the Telezapper…
I assume the boys and girls up in the R&D department of the Super Secret Lair of the Evil Telemarketers must’ve spent a pretty penny and lots of time on developing a way around the Telezapper. Could it really have been worth it to them, or are they doing it out of spite now? I mean, people went out and spent $50 (or whatever it costs now) on this device for the sole purpose of getting rid of telemarketer calls. Do the telemarketers really think that they have a chance in hell of selling anything to these people, who have already made it clear that they don’t want them, by circumventing their piece of technology? If anything, they’re gonna be even more pissed, and much, much less likely to buy anything from you scum! (Sorry Snooooopy; present company excluded. :D)
That’s what I don’t understand either. They are spending money to reach people who made a significant effort to not deal with telemarketers. I would expect the chance for a successful sale to someone who owns a TeleZapper would be extremely low. Not only do they have to upgrade their autodialers, they have to have the staff to answer the phone when it goes through so they can hear “No thank you”. It seems like it would make sense having your staff talk to people who did not make an attempt to block telemarketers.
But “unavailable” doesn’t always mean a telemarketer, unfortunately. We keep telling my grandmother that, and to answer the “unavailable” calls in case of an emergency, but she won’t listen.
Too bad for her.
I too love the statewide Do Not Call lists.
Oh, there’s nothing hard to it. I’m on the do not call list, and for the ones that do somehow creep through a quick, short “goodbye” usually works.
It’s just I find the whole industry reprehensible, and I’d like to be able to zap them. Why I’m smiling just at the idea. But I accept that electrocution might seem a little harsh, so how about lurkernomore’s sonic laxative idea?
Now if even that eminently justified response seems too harsh, how about Monty’s idea? If my attention is of such interest to these organizations, why shouldn’t they have to pay me for my time? Surely that’s fair…although it really doesn’t grab me as much as zapping them. With that sort of option, I could even start to look forward to such calls.
Teletazer - you know it makes sense. Any good electrical engineers on the board who can help?
:eek: Whoa! You mean phone spammers can now fake their name and number on my caller ID?
How does the phone company allow this (technically or otherwise)?
And just what is “predictive dialing”?
So, are we now going to see a game of technological leapfrog between the makers of the Telezapper and the telemarketers? I suppose the TZ will need to be designed so that it can be easily upgraded once the TM side gets wise to the TZ’s methods to thwart them. This situation is similar to the war between radar detector manufacturers and police departments having to come up with ways to defeat radar detectors.
I don’t understand why saying “No, thank you, I’m not interested” is so fucking hard, and so much of a burden for people. Don’t y’all have more important things to worry about, like the temperature of spit?
This is not a very good economy, and there are many people who rely on the fact that a firm is willing to pay telemarketers to make ends meet. I try hard not to project my loathing onto these people. They’re just normal Joes and Janes trying to earn a legal living any way they can.
My ire is focused two ways. First is to the executives that decided this was an acceptable marketing tactic. These are Lucifer’s generals, make no mistake. Who wants to bet that they themselves complain when they receive a telemarketing call? Second is to the people who respond to telemarketing efforts. If no one ever responded, there would be no telemarketing. But lots of people do, enough to keep expanding the industry. This applies to all methods of intrusive, annoying advertising. I’m now adding a third way to focus my ire, and that is towards entrepenuers trying to thwart efforts of people who try to thwart the efforts of telemarketers. I wouldn’t want to be that person’s kid on “What does your daddy do?” day.
(above also applies for spam)
When I got my first apartment I made my own version of the TeleZapper from about $10 of radioshack parts. It goes inline between the phone and the plug. When a telemarketer calls, you press a button. It disconnects the phone from the line but keeps the line open. It then sends a tone through the line that is the loudest (most powerfull) that the phonelines will transmit. It doesn’t delete you from the DataBase, but it sure does feel DAMN good when you get a telemarketing call at 6 am in the morning. It also works well against your GF’s ex BFs, mother-in-laws, and stalkers. >-)
So who wants to buy these from me? $50 a box.
Also, I did a short stint as a telemarketer, so heres something THEY dont want you to know. If they call say “Consumer Requests Delete” they then must delete you from there DB and if they are from a third party Telemarketing company, they must delete you from their entire system. You can also put that message on your answering machine.