Why don’t you two just do it here? It is in the pit, the subject is appropriate. Why bother with another thread?
Let’s get ready to rumble!!!
I don’t want to hijack this one, which is about a thread closure, any more than it already has been. Anyone who feels a burning need to defend the honor of professional parasites is more than welcome to start the conversation in a new venue. That goes for you, too, saoirse.
So turn off the phone when you’re not using it. Screen your calls. Put the phone on silent mode so your all-important meal or book won’t be bothered. If you leave your phone on and answer it, that is an invitation for people to call you. Communication goes BOTH WAYS; if you don’t like it, use your phone for outgoing calls only.
Telemarketers are real people, who probably hate their job more than you hate yours. They make very little pay for a very stressful job. Do you think heaping abuse on them is going to make them feel any worse than they already do? What do you think calling them worms will accomplish? At least they’re working for a living and not sponging off the government.
And I think telemarketing is just a pinch different than door-to-door salesmen or missionaries. Though not much–you can slam a door in someone’s face as easily as you can slam down a phone (although it’s psychologically harder, sure).
I have a phone for the explicit purpose of abusing anyone who dials my number. By calling my number you have expressed your desire to be abused.
Well, in the interest of addressing the OP before this thread heads off into Hijackistan, I’ll point out that closing old threads is not intended to be a negative commentary by the mods on their worth or hilarity. Rather, as Larry Mudd noted, threads simply have a natural life span. Keeping popular threads in a persistant vegetative state in homage to their greatness is a nice idea in theory, but eats up front page real estate and causes temporal confusion in practice. Hence the policy of closing resurrected threads. Once we have such a rule in place, it’s best for all if we enforce it as consistently as possible. Otherwise, people get mad and call us names.
Besides, I hate people who post to old popular threads in a pathetic attempt to be part of something great. It’s like all the people who pretend to have been at past famous events, like Woodstock or the moon landing.
Everyone knows that Woodstock was a government hoax (you could tell by the way the light doesn’t reflect off the acid tablets properly in any of the photos), but I rocked with Country Joe at the moon landing unlike the rest of you posers. I know of what Giraffe speaks.
This notion that owning a phone is “an invitation for [TSR] people to call you,” is one of the most offensively obtuse rationalizations in defense of telemarketers. If I may quote from Cervaise: “I have a butthole, too, but that doesn’t imply I want a running jigsaw inserted into it.” I own a phone so people who have a legitimate need to contact me can do so, and it is my general assumption that any incoming calls come either from someone trying to contact me for the purpose of communicating some bit of information I need to know, or a perfectly legimiate dialing error. I own it at my own expense, unsubsidized by the telemarketing industry which deliberately uses the instrument to interrupt work, dinner, entertainment, et cetera, and the expense is all the more when I receive a call on my cell phone, for which I have to pay a fee for the incoming call.
And then there’s the scamming, the pressured sales pitch, and the blatant rudeness (up to and including the threat to insert a “red hot poker up your ass”) when you inform these doubtless highly stressed callers that I am, in no way, shape, or form interested in their product or service.
And color me unimpressed with the “It’s a job–they have to make money” defense. Nobody “has” to be a telemarketer. I worked my way through high school and college doing everything from being a line cook to a roofer. I’ve chased cattle, moved tons of plumbing supplies in a day, coded last minute desperate patches to other people’s spaghetti code, set fence, shelved books, barbacked, stocked shelves, and any of another half a dozen jobs in order to clear living expenses and make tuition. I did not do this so some half-wit freeloader could, at my expense, interrupt my evening with an undesired solicitation. On the off-hand I require some need for a timeshare condo in North Carolina I’ll contact a relator. If I need vinyl siding I’ll call up Sears. If I wanted a magazine subscription I’ll check out the publisher on-line.
At least the door-to-door types actually have to pound pavement; I can’t say I respect their efforts but they have to go to at least as much trouble as I do, and I’ve never had a door-to-door type scream invective at me because I tell him right out that I’m not interested. A telemarketer can sit there and ping 30 or 40 numbers in an hour without effort, and readily exhibit the attitude Claudia VonL: “Wether I bother you during dinner hour is of no importance or significance to me whatsoever and I do not feel bad because YOU decided to answer your phone.”
If that is a telemarketer’s attitude toward me (and given that they’ve elected to interrupt my evening with a completely unsolicited pitch, this would seem to be the case), then why should I show any semblence of respect for them?
My phone and the bill I have to pay every month does not exist for the convenience of sales-schlubs. Period.
Stranger
Looks like we’re doing this here, then.
I pay for my phone. Every month. I refuse to put limitations on a device I own, and on a service I pay for, because some knuckle-dragging morons couldn’t even qualify for a McJob, and have to pester me in my own home to make up for their gross mental deficencies.
Hey, if a telemarketer doesn’t like the what I say into the receiver of a phone I own, he shouldn’t be calling me in the first place. If owning a phone means a telemarketer gets to call me whenever he wants, then being a telemarketer means putting up with whatever abuse I elect to say into my phone. Communication, after all, goes both ways.
Evidentally, they don’t hate it enough, or they’d have quit by now.
Well, I certainly hope so. But if, by some wild chance, you happen to be correct, and they can’t possibly feel any worse than they already do, then it really doesn’t matter what I say to them, does it?
I would gladly - eagerly, even - pay the extra tax to cover their welfare benefits if they would quit their jobs.
I will say, however, that my position in this rant is largely academic, thanks to the institution of the National Do Not Call list, which I hold to be the greatest human invention since penicillin. I went from four to six telemarketing calls every single day, to one or two a month, tops, once the list went into effect. I hope that the legions of telemarketers put out of work by the list have found gainful employment in a more responsible, socially acceptable field of work. Such as illicit prostitution.
It’s true, there are photos. In fact, I believe that’s SkipMagic in the second picture from the bottom. The only problem is, Skip forgot to the mention the whole thing was fake, as the author of that website astutely notes.
Those look more like pictures of Woodstock to me. At least, that’s the way I remember it.
That’s exactly what they want you to think.
Because the subject of my OP was about closing a classic thread, and NOT about the merits (or lack thereof) of telemarketing?