Telemarketers
Telemarketers
The Luddite believes that there is a special place in hell reserved for telemarketers; if there isn’t, there should be.
Telemarketers are the single biggest reason why The Luddite is suspicious of modern communications technology. If there is one thing that The Luddite loathes, it is making things more complicated than they really need to be. Telemarketers do this by messing with the simple act of answering the phone. This may sound hardass, but The Luddite firmly believes that the one thing he has a finite supply of is time and anything that wastes his stock of it is something to be reflexively hated. Telemarketers fit into this category. So do spammers, but that is a subject for another time. Besides, a true hardass would advocate that all telemarketers—and spammers, for that matter--be lined up against a wall and shot in the knees because their lives should be made just as difficult as they make ours.
The Luddite feels so strongly about this that he engages in behavior designed to keep telemarketers on the line as long as possible, not because he wants to talk to them or buy anything but because The Luddite believes that it is his duty to take up as much of THEIR time and they do of HIS. Also, The Luddite thinks it is the duty of everyone called by telemarketers to not hang up in disgust but to keep them on the phone as long as possible without buying anything. That way they will have less time to bother someone else and looking out for each other is simply neighborly.
The Luddite doesn’t even hear their pitch. Most of the time he simply verifies their identity, puts the phone down on the counter and only picks it up again when it begins beeping. Let them argue with Corian.
The Luddite is not alone in thinking this way. Colorado set up a ‘do not call’ list a couple of years ago and the people in charge of it were astounded by the number of people who called in via telephone or modem wanting to sign up. In fact, the response was so huge—860,000 people in the first three days—that the powers that be had to briefly shut it down in order to install new equipment that could handle the load. When contacted about it, telemarketers said the vehemence of the callers and the popularity of this list surprised them. To the layman, this is known as a ‘lie.’
Telemarketers simply had to know that as far as people are concerned, their PR image was worse than that of used car salesmen. It’s not as if the signs aren’t all there. They couldn’t not know. This year, the idea of a ‘do not call’ list went national. The federal no-call list has a reported 50 million people on it. Mrs. Luddite signed up for both services. She and I are not particularly vindictive, but The Luddite uses his phone in order to make a living and is tired of answering phone calls from people—now it’s someone who wants to reduce my credit card debt--hawking services he does not want and did not ask for.
A popular dodge is that wireless calls are not identified on caller ID, forcing The Luddite to answer them because he does not know who is on the other end. The Luddite used to answer blocked calls because he once heard from a Qwest representative that answering them, putting the phone down and only putting the phone back on it’s cradle when it beeped was a way of removing your phone number from the telemarketing computer. It didn’t work.
Now if he doesn’t know you, expect to hear from you, or you are on the ‘blocked calls’ list, prepare to hear The Luddite’s answering machine and never get a call back.
The Luddite has cynically wondered how telemarketers will get around the no-call list. A company calling from Arizona used a tactic The Luddite ran into last summer. It offered him a package at a ski resort as an inducement. According to a law librarian friend of The Luddite, this is being used more and more by companies because they can argue that they are not selling anything but instead giving something away when they call. The sales pitch comes later. Already a federal appeals court in Oklahoma has stopped the federal do-not-call list from taking effect next week on the grounds that the Federal Trade Commission overstepped it’s authority when it put the thing in place. (Ed. Note: The appeals court matter is now over and to be blunt, the outcome was that the telemarketers can go pound sand.) Here in Colorado, there is a judge who has ruled against the state do-not-call list on First Amendment grounds, claiming the law should include charities and all the exemptions as well and not single out businesses. It should not be too much of a surprise to say that The Luddite actually agrees with this argument. An interruption is an interruption, whether it comes from a newspaper soliciting funds or from someone in a windowless box reading a script about my credit card balances. What the judge is saying--metaphorically, of course-- is, ‘Kill ‘em all! Let God sort ‘em out!’ (Ed. Note: The telemarketers must have pissed off some judges too as they were sitting down to dinner because they lost this one too. Ah, silence.)
The no-call list seems to be having an effect. However, in the instances that it doesn’t, The Luddite follows an array of strategies for dealing with telemarketers. When one used to get a live voice on the other end of the phone, The Luddite would ask them to repeat their pitch over and over or pretend to be an old lady with a hearing problem. The Luddite kept one fellow on the phone for an exasperated six minutes before he muttered, “Aw to hell with it,” and hung up. Now that telemarketers are increasingly going to taped messages, the approach no longer works, although The Luddite is tempted to call one of those 800 numbers mentioned in the tapes and pretend to be a befuddled old lady looking for her children and bitching that they never write.
The Luddite increasingly relies on caller ID to weed out the chaff. The Luddite realizes this is using new technology to defeat another new technology, and looks upon the entire enterprise as ironic as hell, but his dislike of telemarketers leaves him no choice. The Luddite is thinking about putting them on hold, just to see if he can get away with it and how long they will stay there, but as yet he has no reliable way of timing them.
Another tactic that The Luddite follows is to listen to a telemarketer’s entire pitch and say that what they are selling sounds really useful and something that he really, really wants, right now. Then when he is asked for credit card information or asked if he wants to order, The Luddite says he is going to talk to the man’s competitor the next day but thanks him for the idea. Then he hangs up. The Luddite is not sure if this works, as he doesn’t associate with this type of people, preferring to hang in more respectable society, such as with panhandlers, hit men and pimps.
The only other method that The Luddite uses is ‘shunning,’ which the Amish employ. It is a form of ignoring people, which mandates that you have nothing to do with someone, including talking to them. The Luddite has tried that but cannot resist indulging in good old-fashioned verbal abuse. Once, he even told a telemarketer who declared that she had to eat that she should “get into a decent line of work” if she was hungry and should “come over for a tuna fish sandwich.” The Luddite has even reached into a child’s Halloween sack and yanked out a little boy’s treat because he recognized the kid’s mother, who had accompanied him to the door, as a telemarketer. Then he told the little boy he wasn’t getting anything because of Mommy’s job. Mommy was, to put it mildly, horrified. The drawback to this last approach is that it is too slow, outside of it being too hard on the soul. The Luddite realizes that this is letting the sins of the fathers trickle down to the children but he figures that since the children of Nazis put up with the same thing all their lives, it’s not like it’s without precedent.
Finally, The Luddite tells the person on the phone that he simply has no money, as in none. No matter how low they go, The Luddite says he has no money with which to pay them. It never used to work but now it seems to be accepted more and more, probably because of the state of the Economy. Depressingly enough, The Luddite has not had to lie yet.
The Luddite believes that there is a special place in hell reserved for telemarketers; if there isn’t, there should be.
Telemarketers are the single biggest reason why The Luddite is suspicious of modern communications technology. If there is one thing that The Luddite loathes, it is making things more complicated than they really need to be. Telemarketers do this by messing with the simple act of answering the phone. This may sound hardass, but The Luddite firmly believes that the one thing he has a finite supply of is time and anything that wastes his stock of it is something to be reflexively hated. Telemarketers fit into this category. So do spammers, but that is a subject for another time. Besides, a true hardass would advocate that all telemarketers—and spammers, for that matter--be lined up against a wall and shot in the knees because their lives should be made just as difficult as they make ours.
The Luddite feels so strongly about this that he engages in behavior designed to keep telemarketers on the line as long as possible, not because he wants to talk to them or buy anything but because The Luddite believes that it is his duty to take up as much of THEIR time and they do of HIS. Also, The Luddite thinks it is the duty of everyone called by telemarketers to not hang up in disgust but to keep them on the phone as long as possible without buying anything. That way they will have less time to bother someone else and looking out for each other is simply neighborly.
The Luddite doesn’t even hear their pitch. Most of the time he simply verifies their identity, puts the phone down on the counter and only picks it up again when it begins beeping. Let them argue with Corian.
The Luddite is not alone in thinking this way. Colorado set up a ‘do not call’ list a couple of years ago and the people in charge of it were astounded by the number of people who called in via telephone or modem wanting to sign up. In fact, the response was so huge—860,000 people in the first three days—that the powers that be had to briefly shut it down in order to install new equipment that could handle the load. When contacted about it, telemarketers said the vehemence of the callers and the popularity of this list surprised them. To the layman, this is known as a ‘lie.’
Telemarketers simply had to know that as far as people are concerned, their PR image was worse than that of used car salesmen. It’s not as if the signs aren’t all there. They couldn’t not know. This year, the idea of a ‘do not call’ list went national. The federal no-call list has a reported 50 million people on it. Mrs. Luddite signed up for both services. She and I are not particularly vindictive, but The Luddite uses his phone in order to make a living and is tired of answering phone calls from people—now it’s someone who wants to reduce my credit card debt--hawking services he does not want and did not ask for.
A popular dodge is that wireless calls are not identified on caller ID, forcing The Luddite to answer them because he does not know who is on the other end. The Luddite used to answer blocked calls because he once heard from a Qwest representative that answering them, putting the phone down and only putting the phone back on it’s cradle when it beeped was a way of removing your phone number from the telemarketing computer. It didn’t work.
Now if he doesn’t know you, expect to hear from you, or you are on the ‘blocked calls’ list, prepare to hear The Luddite’s answering machine and never get a call back.
The Luddite has cynically wondered how telemarketers will get around the no-call list. A company calling from Arizona used a tactic The Luddite ran into last summer. It offered him a package at a ski resort as an inducement. According to a law librarian friend of The Luddite, this is being used more and more by companies because they can argue that they are not selling anything but instead giving something away when they call. The sales pitch comes later. Already a federal appeals court in Oklahoma has stopped the federal do-not-call list from taking effect next week on the grounds that the Federal Trade Commission overstepped it’s authority when it put the thing in place. (Ed. Note: The appeals court matter is now over and to be blunt, the outcome was that the telemarketers can go pound sand.) Here in Colorado, there is a judge who has ruled against the state do-not-call list on First Amendment grounds, claiming the law should include charities and all the exemptions as well and not single out businesses. It should not be too much of a surprise to say that The Luddite actually agrees with this argument. An interruption is an interruption, whether it comes from a newspaper soliciting funds or from someone in a windowless box reading a script about my credit card balances. What the judge is saying--metaphorically, of course-- is, ‘Kill ‘em all! Let God sort ‘em out!’ (Ed. Note: The telemarketers must have pissed off some judges too as they were sitting down to dinner because they lost this one too. Ah, silence.)
The no-call list seems to be having an effect. However, in the instances that it doesn’t, The Luddite follows an array of strategies for dealing with telemarketers. When one used to get a live voice on the other end of the phone, The Luddite would ask them to repeat their pitch over and over or pretend to be an old lady with a hearing problem. The Luddite kept one fellow on the phone for an exasperated six minutes before he muttered, “Aw to hell with it,” and hung up. Now that telemarketers are increasingly going to taped messages, the approach no longer works, although The Luddite is tempted to call one of those 800 numbers mentioned in the tapes and pretend to be a befuddled old lady looking for her children and bitching that they never write.
The Luddite increasingly relies on caller ID to weed out the chaff. The Luddite realizes this is using new technology to defeat another new technology, and looks upon the entire enterprise as ironic as hell, but his dislike of telemarketers leaves him no choice. The Luddite is thinking about putting them on hold, just to see if he can get away with it and how long they will stay there, but as yet he has no reliable way of timing them.
Another tactic that The Luddite follows is to listen to a telemarketer’s entire pitch and say that what they are selling sounds really useful and something that he really, really wants, right now. Then when he is asked for credit card information or asked if he wants to order, The Luddite says he is going to talk to the man’s competitor the next day but thanks him for the idea. Then he hangs up. The Luddite is not sure if this works, as he doesn’t associate with this type of people, preferring to hang in more respectable society, such as with panhandlers, hit men and pimps.
The only other method that The Luddite uses is ‘shunning,’ which the Amish employ. It is a form of ignoring people, which mandates that you have nothing to do with someone, including talking to them. The Luddite has tried that but cannot resist indulging in good old-fashioned verbal abuse. Once, he even told a telemarketer who declared that she had to eat that she should “get into a decent line of work” if she was hungry and should “come over for a tuna fish sandwich.” The Luddite has even reached into a child’s Halloween sack and yanked out a little boy’s treat because he recognized the kid’s mother, who had accompanied him to the door, as a telemarketer. Then he told the little boy he wasn’t getting anything because of Mommy’s job. Mommy was, to put it mildly, horrified. The drawback to this last approach is that it is too slow, outside of it being too hard on the soul. The Luddite realizes that this is letting the sins of the fathers trickle down to the children but he figures that since the children of Nazis put up with the same thing all their lives, it’s not like it’s without precedent.
Finally, The Luddite tells the person on the phone that he simply has no money, as in none. No matter how low they go, The Luddite says he has no money with which to pay them. It never used to work but now it seems to be accepted more and more, probably because of the state of the Economy. Depressingly enough, The Luddite has not had to lie yet.
posted by S. Olson at 2:21 PM
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