Damn, Cantrip–I wanted that sig!
lissener, if you let me know an inconvenient time, I’ll call you and gloat. 
I received calls this morning on all of our office’s four lines from a telemarketer at the Washington Times. The first two came about 2 minutes apart, the next about an hour and a half later, and the fourth right after that. The first I told that we weren’t interested. The next three were told that I had already spoken with X number of their people already, followed by my hanging up. Really raised my opinion of telemarketing.
It still astounds me how many telemarketes want to make it incumbent on the receiver rather than the caller to incur the effort and expense to stop the unwanted calls. Where I come from, that’s called “extortion.” There shouldn’t be any “magic words”; any phrase which conveys the thought, “Stop calling me” should be sufficient.
In a house where I once lived, we had three phone lines for the different occupants. They were in sequence (i.e. xxx-xxx6, xxx-xxx7, and xxx-xxx8).
One day, my roommate (who had the second line) accidently picked up the first line when it rang. It was a telemarketer. He politely said he wasn’t interested and hung up.
Immediately after that, his line rang. He answered and again said he still wasn’t interested. He told me that she sounded very confused, like she thought she had dialed the same number twice.
So when the third line rang, he just picked up that one too and said, “Look, stop calling me!”
hee hee
I used to be a peon for an insurance company. One of my stations was the front desk, taking and routing incoming calls. The office had about 20 incoming lines, although it only had one published number. If the main number was busy, then the call would be routed to the next available line. You could, however, call the lines directly–they all had “real” numbers. The switchboard was very busy; although anyone working the front desk had other responsibilities for when things slowed down our main job was answering the telephone and it kept us busy. I developed a deep and abiding hatred for telemarketers during that job, since anyone dialing sequentially would work their way through every incoming line. I didn’t have to tell one telemarketer once to not call, I had to tell every telemarketer twenty times to not call, all while trying to route calls, take messages for people who weren’t in, page people whom I knew should be in (unless they’d forgotten to tell me they were leaving) but weren’t at their desks, and generally keep my head.
They weren’t totally Evil, just irritating. After all, they didn’t know that they were calling me 20 times in a row and one person actually apologized to me when I explained why she kept getting me and that the calls were tying up the switchboard. Much more culpable were some from last winter. Because I have a home office and my clients may be several time zones away, I almost always answer the telephone at the EftHouse no matter the time of day. I also have carte blanche to take any and all unsolicited calls, since no one here wants to take the time to field telemarketers. One evening the telemarketer wanting to sell us telephone service asked for the EftSpouse, and I declined on his behalf and asked them not to call again. Shortly thereafter, they called again and asked for him. Nope–same thing. Getting progressively ruder, they continued to call that evening at short intervals, evidently hoping that someone else would answer the telephone (which, of course, wasn’t going to happen). I asked to speak to a supervisor, who was downright nasty about my refusing to let them talk to the EftSpouse (who was right there and did not want to talk to them). Finally, they started hanging up when they heard my voice. (Yes, it was them. I heard the muffled curse once and recognized the caller’s voice.) After about an hour of this, they gave up, but this harassment reinforced my conviction that it will be a cold day in Hell before I ever purchase anything sold by a telemarketer.
Eft:
Heh, we hate that too. You only had 20 lines to deal with - imagine when we hit a hospital that has hundreds of lines.
Wouldn’t it have been easier for him to get on the phone for 15 seconds and put an end to it?
A telemarketer’s job is to make those calls. My job was not to be fielding unsolicited phone calls on a busy switchboard that had a hefty load of legitimate incoming calls. And I had those same 20 phone lines to deal with every day. Sorry–no sympathies.
We’re talking about someone who spent over an hour harassing a person she was cold calling. It might have been easier–had it worked. Given her reaction to a polite “we’re not interested, don’t call again” I doubt our usual brushoff would have worked. Surely you’re not going to argue that her actions were reasonable. Frankly, I was shocked that she went to the trouble to be that much of a bitch.
Poor you. Now imagine being the beleaguered switchboard operator who has to tell the same company 100 times in a row that they aren’t interested.
Frankly, if your target market is “every number in this area code and exchange, in numerical order,” someone has done a piss-poor job of market research, charity or no.
Its not a job of market research, piss-poor or otherwise; it’s an autodialer. A lot of telemarketers essentially use them to call nnn-0000 through nnn-9999, in numerical order.
I don’t recall if it’s been posted on this thread or board, but Junkbusters Telemarketing Headlines is certainly worth looking at.
That is a great link, thanks! 
…Judges?
Well, Cervaise, Claudia VonL said
If she said it, it must be true. So I’m going to have to say that, despite the accolades of nearly all of the 11,000-odd members of the SDMB (and I do mean “odd”), I’m going to have to go with the Toxic Shock Robot on this one.
Must…not…explode with laughter MMMWWWAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHA!
Cervaise, do you really need to ask? Or, as Claudia might say, “aks”?
Wow Mr2001, I had no idea you had to put up with all that. My sympathies to you. For you see, I for one would much rather have a place that deals in life and death decisions, where every second counts, be innundated with 100 consecutive irrelevant phone calls than helping patients receive the best care possible. After all, it is the hospital’s fault, right? If they didn’t want calls from telemarketers, they shouldn’t have put in the phone lines. Clearly they shouldn’t have even picked up the phone in the first place. Thank you for putting this all in perspective.
pldennison:
You mean the operator who gets 100 “sorry, wrong number” in a row. We don’t bother pitching businesses.
The organization is about equally relevant to everyone in the state, and I haven’t noticed any buying patterns. Sales are much more dependent on the time of year than the locations we call.
Care to suggest something more effective?
Enderw23:
By calling them once, we can mark their numbers so we don’t call again. This helps both us and them.
If they want to call/write in and say “Hi, I’m from Sacred Heart and we have the numbers 456-1111 through 456-1444, please stop calling,” I’m sure we’d be glad to save everyone the trouble. But that doesn’t happen very often.
Care to suggest a better way to decide which numbers belong to hospitals or large businesses?
You’re still willfully missing the point, and fudging the central issue: no telephone customer should have to prove “need” to be exempt from commercial pests!
Telemarketing, by its nature, intrudes on others. As it’s structured now, telemarketers exploit a utility to hawk their wares. The entire sick, cynical premise is that anyone who pays for that utility must be held hostage to every greed-bag soliciter going–unless they have “magic words”, or spiffy techno-fixes or some good reason not to be bothered!
Piffle, fie, be damned, be gone and weary my ears no more with your mewling, pitiful excuses! The entire premise is unconscienceable. Participate as you must, but don’t take on the idiocy as your own–unless it’s really how you approach the world and other people.
In which case most of us shall feel free to turn your own complete lack of conscience and scruples right back on you.
If this is too ambiguous, just keep in mind how parasites are usually regarded, e.g. ticks, remoras, etc.
Disgusted,
Veb
Cervaise
I am not fit to drink your bathwater.
Please let me know the next time someone ticks you off enough to trigger another such screed. I will be there with popcorn.
Kindest regards,
Shodan
All right, I can’t resist. All quotes from Claudia.
>> Geez if I’d had know that putting a post up here would set off a flurry of personal attacks,I’d have kept my mouth shut.
No, putting up a stupid, ill-considered, and indefensibly arrogant post is what elicited the attacks. And since you’ve decided not to keep your mouth shut, prepare to be dumped on once again.
>> So let me the chance to defend myself and add a bit.
Seems to me you’re missing a verb there, in the fourth position. I respectfully suggest “squander.”
>> I can appreiate the need to rip someone a new aHole**
In this case, replace “need” with “obligation.”
>> but if it is within your personal ethics to call an unknown peson such names i’d not want to be your mother,
Once again, a mystifying leap of illogic from the Tactlessly Simpleminded Redialer. (By the way, I am resisting the strong temptation to continue making fun of your inability to construct a simple sentence without the unremitting grammatical and spelling mistakes even an inebriated howler monkey would be able to avoid. You’re welcome.)
**>> Because it s obvious you missed a few things she said when she tried to teach you about politeness **
My mouth hangs agape.
This from the same person who admits her conscience is unaffected by her repeatedly interrupting and ruining someone’s day, who admits people don’t like what she does, who suffers no qualms at all at engaging in such a disruptive and universally loathed occupation. And all I do is point out what a selfish, supercilious twat you are, and suddenly, once again, I’m the bad guy. As I said before, in your mind, it’s my fault you’re such a cunt. Did you even understand what I wrote before?
Oh, I’m sorry, stupid question. You can barely form an English sentence; I shouldn’t be surprised that those of others would go whizzing through your empty skull like water through a sewer pipe.
>> Never in all my years has a rebuttal to someone included name calling and other smallness.
Based on your record here, I’d say they haven’t included intelligence, logic, coherence, or any degree of real-world empathy, either.
>> Usually they are well thought out and articulated without resorting to Junior High behavior with a degreed vocabulary.
I would advise you to go back and re-read the original message. I didn’t just call you names. No, I systematically dismantled your entire argument, showing it to be poorly reasoned, self-contradictory, and completely lacking in any kind of sense. Then I called you names. I was justified in this because only a glue-sniffing rodent could have produced your “argument” and believed it to be comprehensible and germane. I note with satisfaction that you have not attempted to refute any of my specific points. Instead, you hide behind a false martyrdom, as if my thoroughly detailed and accurate thrashing was ad hominem instead of based solely on your hopelessly convoluted and paradoxical post.
>> Somewhere in there you lost your credibility.
This, I trust, requires no response.
>> I know I asked for this by posting as a TSR.
No, you asked for it by posting as a self-centered, sniggering shithead. You will note I have not leveled my artillery at Mr2001, deserving as he might be, because he has at least attempted to maintain a civil tone. But if his so-called arguments get any more tortuous – particularly in his sad attempt to demonstrate that the employees of a hospital (a hospital, for Chrissakes) should expect to waste their critically valuable patient care time telling telemarketers to fuck the hell off – I may very well lob a few mortars in his direction.
>> And I propperly accept the bashing as I asked for it
You have no idea how much you asked for it.
>> but consiter what that message said as opposed to reading what you pleased as to draw your own conclutions
I did exactly that. If you go back and reread my message, you will see that I used your own words against you. All I did was point out your contradictions, your asinine failures to make sense, your complete lack of any kind of logic or reasoning. You attempted to defend yourself, but instead you made yourself look like an idiot. I simply drew circles and arrows around your own arguments, throwing a diagram of your caesurae of sense, your lacunae of logic, right back at you. You have, apparently, completely missed the point. I am, needless to say, entirely without surprise at this.
>> therefor allowing further ranting.
And coming back and offering another half-baked message? What was I supposed to make of that? Don’t answer, it’s a rhetorical question. Look it up. It’s between “rhesus monkey” and “rhino.”
>> It’s as ill as using bible verse out of context.
Once again, you have succeeded in mystifying me. If this is part of your lame martyr act, cloaking your evil in the pages of the Gospel, rest assured, it’s transparently shameless. Par for the course.
(The reference you were seeking, by the way, is from Act One of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice. “The Devil can quote Scripture for his purpose.” Pick up a book sometime, you dumb fuck.)
>> I happen to consiter myself Intelegent and articulate,
I beg you to reconsider this opinion before you embarrass yourself in a far more public and damaging arena. Or don’t. Your loss.
>> I just hapeento have better things to waste my apitudes on than a silly post.
Buh bye. Don’t let the door hit you in the brain pan.
>> Rip ma as you please…
By posting your original diatribe, you already gave me permission.
>> I’ll still Love you and pray for you nonetheless.
No you won’t, you lying sack of supercilious snot. You’ll sit, and fume, and wonder how on earth you can prove to us that telemarketing isn’t the unpleasant human endeavor it truly is. Perhaps a tiny grain of doubt has been planted, that you are either (1) wasting your life, or (2) a perfect shitraking fit for a universally loathed occupation.
Look, I’m going to try this one more time. Reread the message. I disassembled your arguments and threw them back at you. You were, and are, wrong. Period. Then reread all of the following messages. Everyone agreed with me, except for the aforementioned Mr2001, but we expected that. And even he, the misguided defender of telemarketing, denigrated your attitude, saying you “fit the profile” and suggesting you to be a high-school dropout. Furthermore, everyone else who had performed telemarketing at some previous point in their careers said they had hated it, that they felt bad interrupting people’s lives, that they got out of it as quickly as they could.
You, inexplicably, enjoy it. And for that, I suggested you need psychiatric assistance. I repeat that assertion here.
Your move.
Cervaise, Great One, Teacher. I registerd for the sole purpose of complimenting you on your inspired diatribe.
My personal favorite was the bit about the jack handle. I’m a cinderblock guy myself, but your words have inspired me to “look outside the box” as it were.
You’re my hero.
I nominate Veb’s post for a very close second. It may have been shorter, but it struck straight at the heart of the matter. Thank you.
I came over here from the original thread, and I was just blown away by Cervaise’s eloquent response.
Now, in that thread, Doug Bowe suggested that telemarketers should be sought out and sentenced to hard time.
Cervaise, I hate to hijack such a work of art, but…
My much more colourful idea (see here) was to form crack squads of elite exterminators and hunt them down like the vermin they are. I volunteered to operate the flamethrower for one such squad.
Does anybody else have any better ideas?
Pete
Long time RGMWer and ardent AOLer