Do Telemarketers ever manage to sell anything to anyone other than the people who are addicted to the Home Shopping Network and appear to use it to fill the emptiness in their lives?
My particular favorites are the pre-recorded messages. They don't even use a real person to harass me in my own home. The latest is The Department of Solar Energy Efficiency or some such bullshit pseudo governmental sounding title designed to make people think they are being contacted by a real official government agency.
The caller tries to hook you by telling you that there is going to be a rate hike for electricity but if you press one now to talk to a live person (thank god, I thought I might have to talk to a dead person) you can help stop the rate increase. If you aren't interested and wish to be removed from the call list, you are told to press three now. Want to guess how many times I've pressed three? But they're still calling. They're calling multiple times a day and night. I've finally decided I'm going to have to press one and speak to that live person. Perhaps if my language is bad enough, they will stop calling.
Then there is that sweet real estate salesperson who tells me she just sold a house in my neighborhood. "Congratulations" I say. "Why are you telling me about it?" She would love to help me sell my house. But I'm not interested in selling my house. She's still calling.
And once you attend any kind of play, opera or ballet, you can bet someone will call multiple times to try to sell you a subscription. Sorry, but being bothered in my home is not going to increase my attendance.
Like all or most people, we have Caller I.D. It doesn't just come up on our phones, it flashes on our TV screen - announcing loudly that the call is from Unavailable. Guess what? We're unavailable.
People that think they are going to get a new customer by constantly interrupting something we are trying to enjoy uninterrupted will never get our business.
The worst, of course, are those who call at night. When the phone rings late, my first thought, being a pessimist by nature, is that someone I know and love has died. When I'm finished with my response to them, they'll wish they had died.
Someone posted a wonderful suggestion for the unwanted caller - simply answer without identifying yourself and say "It's done but there's blood everywhere." A friend of mine actually started using it. She gets fewer uninvited calls than she used to.
Another favorite - the guy who tells me he's not selling anything but I may have won a trip to Acapulco. Yeah, right. Probably the place selling Mexican food over on Pacific downtown.
Some of it is more serious and amounts to illegal attempts to scam people out of money - like the guy who has been calling around hoping to encounter someone gullible enough to believe that he represents the IRS and, unless Mr. or Mrs. Gullible pays money, he or she is going to jail. Someone should be going straight to f...ing jail and it isn't Mr. or Mrs. Gullible.
I'm not too happy with the door to door people either. I do not need someone to help me get into heaven, or to deliver food to my door (I'm not a shut-in yet). If I want someone to buy my junk car, clean my house or mow my lawn, I'm capable of finding them on my own. It is a pretty simple matter to buy a No Solicitation sign and install it on your gate. Some people will ignore it but you can always remind them that they've just broken the law by doing so.
Now if it was only possible to hang a No Solicitation sign on my phone, life would be a lot simpler.
No comments:
Post a Comment