If you didn’t yell, be mean, or rude to those telemarketers they wouldn’t get paid as much. So your doing them a service by making their life a living hell:) If all they had to do was call people then they wouldn’t get paid much would they?
But this is war.
Telemarketing is the enemy.
Telemarketers are the enemy soldiers.
Are we to worry about the feelings of the enemy soldiers in fighting the war? Are we worried about their keeping their jobs as enemy soldiers?
Sure, I pity the individuals involved. But I don’t want anybody to have a job in that field. Telemarketing is rapidly becoming a blight on society.
Fight the good fight.
Telemarketers use a script, so why shouldn’t you?
http://www.junkbusters.com/ht/en/script.html
It’s the JunkBusters Anti-Telemarketing Script. No, it’s nothing rude. It’s a series of very polite questions (“Are you calling to sell me something? Could you tell me your name please?”) that culminate in asking them politely to put you on their do-not-call list.
Depending on their answer to certain questions (e.g., if they answer “no” to the question, “Will your company keep my number on its do-not-call list for ten years?”) you may be able to sue them for $1500 under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act.
Trust me, this is much better than playing pranks or getting enraged. What would you rather be doing, getting revenge on a telemarketer, or sitting peacefully in your home not being bothered by telemarketer calls?
(I’m just waiting for some telemarketer apologist to come along and say, “But, if we put the telemarketers out of business, what will all those poor people do to pay their bills?” Uh, find a job that doesn’t involve harassing other people, maybe?)
That carpet-cleaning story reminded me of a similar ploy: mass confusion. Try and make their brains explode. My brother-in-law once got a call from some carpet cleaners, and he said “No thanks. We don’t have floors.” Dead silence. 
Thank you, Tranquilis; that’s exactly where I was coming from (or trying, anyway). Beautifully said.
De nada.
This is the answer to telemarketing, and you get the satisfaction of fighting fire with fire, while keeping to the high road:
Ya know, I have a job where I am on the phone most of the day, calling banks, mortgage companies, lawyer’s offices, credit bureaus, collection agencies, blah blah blah. I know the pain of that plastic personality that you have to keep up even if the person on the other end of the phone is a Grade-A asshole. (This is especially hard for me as I am NOT a nice person but have to pretend at all costs to be one.) I have dealt with poeple who should be not be allowed out to play with other humans, much less be allowed to answer the phone. It sucks, but you know what? It’s my fucking job.
I will tell you one thing, though, I will never call an individual in their home and wake them up at 9:00 on a fine Saturday morning like some telemarketer just did to me. We get 3-4 calls from them from between 5-9 at night. I usually get one when I’m trying to get ready to go to work in the morning. Now, ** do I give a shit** if the guy calling me has no other marketable skills, is so stupid as to be untrainable for any other job, if is such dire economical need that he must take this job and this job ONLY (yeah, right, baby)? NO NO NO NO NO. The difference between me and this putz if that he took a job where he is * invading people’s homes * and disrupting their day to try and hustle some product that he knows full fucking well they probably don’t want or need. I have never sworn at a telemarker or played a prank on them. Do I feel sorry for them when I hear a story about someone who has? ** Fuck and no**. It’s the consequence of a loathsome job that they took on their own free will.
(Besides, they can’t all be morons if ** Manservant Hec ** was one. Come on now, people.)
I only get rude to telemarketers if they behave in a dense manner.
I let them get to a point in their pitch where they have to take a breath and I tell them, “This doesn’t sound like something we can take advantage of right now, but thank you for calling.” Then I gently hang up.
As I said, I only get rude if they try to bullrush me with more of their pitch. I know enough about sales to understand that a closing technique is to overcome a negative response at least three times, but having to say no three times pisses me off. Hence my decision to say no once, thank them for calling and gently hang up.
Last time I was rude was when a home refinancing guy called. I’ve only had my mortgage for a year and a half and I don’t want to mess around with another load of paperwork, thank you. I told the telemarketer I wasn’t interested and he started annoying me by asking what my interest rate was. Since it wasn’t any of his business, I told him I wasn’t interested again. He responded with a somewhat arrogant, “What’s the matter, don’t you want to save some money?” It was his arrogant manner that made me snap. I replied, “No, it’s not that, I just don’t want to talk to you anymore.” And I hung up, not so gently.
I’ve been on the recieving end of undeserved abuse by homeowners, so I don’t dish it out. And I don’t want to waste the telemarketers time, either. But if they are going to hit me commando-style, I’m going to retaliate in kind.
You’re kidding, right?
Whether people turn down telemarketers politely or otherwise, the net result is, they’re not buying anything. Profits go down, so the solution TM companies have found is, get telemarketers to work for minimum plus commission. So the collective mean people are actually decreasing the 'marketer’s salary.
It is best to say clearly that you are not interested. I never have been (and never will be, unless it’s my only remaining legal employment option) a telemarketer, but my most recent temp assignment is with a firm that conducts telephone surveys for a local hospital. A lot of people hang up on us. I can understand that; we are intruding into their lives, and even though we say right away that we’re conducting a survey and not selling anything I’m sure a lot of people either don’t believe us or just don’t want to waste their time.
Still, I wish they’d say “Not interested!” before slamming the receiver down. Not just because it’s more polite (I don’t really expect people to be polite to unsolicited callers), but because of the way our calling system works. We have a code to indicate the result of each call. There is one code for people who refuse to participate in the survey, and another code for disconnected calls. If people say they don’t want to participate in the survey, we mark down the “refused” code and never call them again. If they just hang up we’re supposed to put down the disconnected code, NOT the refusal code. This means that we can call the same number up to four more times on subsequent evenings until someone either completes the survey or actually says flat out that they don’t want to do it. So everytime someone hangs up on me, I think “You fool! We’re just going to call you back later!”
Actually, no one who hangs up on me will be called again – I mark them down as refusals. I figure I might as well be as nice as possible while performing my annoying job. But I’m not relying upon commissions, as most telemarketers are. So do yourselves a favor, people, and verbally refuse before hanging up. It only takes a few seconds longer, and it might prevent future calls.
Well, seeing as how I’ve admitted twice in the last few days to having run a telemarketing department in my sordid past I’d been trying to avoid chiming back in here.
(Really, it’s like admitting you pick your nose and eat it. In Fenris’ ‘how much is your soul worth’ thread I was told that, since I’d run a telemarketing shop Satan himself wouldn’t put a bid in on my soul. Hell did offer me a job, though, proving I have marketable skills ANYWHERE.)
But I thought I’d share this with the lot of you:
Six or so months ago I got a telemarketing call. Very polite young man, decent at his job. He called me up to tell me that the initial (the one that was in place when the house was built, he was at pains to point out) warranty on my HVAC in my home (and the others in my development) was coming to an end and his HVAC company would be glad to do an inspection and issue me a new warranty.
Quoth I (without missing a beat): “WOW! That was SOME warranty!”
Him: “???”
Some background:
- I live in rural Virginia, near the WV border
- I don’t live in a development
- Hey there Opal
- The are no other houses in my neighborhood
- Our place is 133 years old!
So he asked is ANYONE near us had a new home and I had to tell him, “No”. He thanked me, never to call the 540-668-??? exchange again.
But he was good-humored about it. And I find that to be important.
I like to ask for a supervisor, and then chat about the weather, try to get some phone sex (especially if it’s a guy…really freaks them out), talk about sports, and other stuff like that. Basically, every call I get, my first line is “May I speak with your supervisor?” and then, to their supervisor “May I speak with YOUR supervisor?” Then it’s chatting time. I figure at the 3d level, I’m wasting about $20/hour of the telemarketers money on pathetic phone sex, sports chat, or the weather in Dallas. Plus, it’s fun, and I never have to listen to a sales pitch.
The junkbusters script is great, too, especially if you hit them with random questions from the middle of it right in the middle of last night’s playoff game. Keeps them on their toes, don’t you know.
I very rarely unleash a tirade of profanities, at least anymore. One called me at 8 o’clock on a saturday last year, though. I picked up the phone, half awake, gave a weak “hello?” and as soon as they mispronounced my name, I told the bitch to NEVER ever ever call me again, and did she realize how fucking early in the goddammed morning it was, and that I was up until 4am the night before, and then just kinda fired the phone in a random direction…I don’t think it got hung up. Oh well.
Come on… if you’re going to “fight fire with fire”, you have to telemarket back at them.
(Update: Since I made that post, I’ve had a couple chances to actually do it, even though I no longer work in the telephone fundraising industry. Worked like a charm. ;))