What to say to a telemarketer

[Howard]

Oh FFS. I've been on the TPS for years, and I've had precisely 0 marketing calls to my home phone number in that time. If I were to get one, it would, I am almost certain, originate from outside the UK, and be the result of a 'brute force' mass dialling attempt. I get the odd one on my mobile every couple of months. The fact is, the people making these calls are Indians (or other relatively poor people in the 2nd/3rd world), who genuinely don't have the option of a burger flipping job at McDonalds. Once they're finished disturbing you in your home, they may well be going home to a corrugated iron shack, or a tent. Abusing these people isn't just unkind- it's pathetic, and furthermore, it's utterly Un-British, a disgrace to a nation that once believed in good manners. I increasingly want to emigrate, not because immigrants are spoiling the country, but because indiginous English people are turning into a race of insufferably rude, intolerant bastards who I wouldn't piss on if they were on fire.

So, Saracen, you're not rude to people who stop you outside the supermarket. I take it though that you spit in the face of door-to-door salesmen who interupt your dinner, and tell them roundly to get the **** off your property? Because IMO that's even more disruptive than phoning you.

I agree. So you get a telemarketing call once every two months.. Get over it.
If it's not convenient to answer the phone, don't. I'm sure you have an answering machine, right? If it's important, they'll leave a message. Alternatively if you have a cordless phone with caller display, you can choose to ignore it if it says number withheld or whatever. I registered on the TPS after receiving more of these calls than I'd like, and now we receive drastically less.

Sure it's a little irritating especially when you get silence at the end due to a mass-dialing, but if it's a person all you've gotta do is say no thanks. The callers don't make the rules, the companies they work for do.

[Dareos]

I take the trouble and cost of having two phone lines - one a general purpose line, and one a private line. There are less than a dozen people that have that private number, and for a very specific reason, which I don't feel inclined to explain.

You are really Batman, right?

and furthermore, it's utterly Un-British, a disgrace to a nation that once believed in good manners. I increasingly want to emigrate, not because immigrants are spoiling the country, but because indiginous English people are turning into a race of insufferably rude, intolerant bastards who I wouldn't piss on if they were on fire.

oh fine, but when i say it, suddenly i'm a racist, english hating, haggis eating, social reprobate with a penchant for wearing a tartan skirt with nothing under it but my socks.


In all seriousness though, getting spammed by 5-10 calls a day is starting to piss me off, i have had at least 3 calls this week from Space Kitchens, which are a UK company as far as i know. So i firmly believe in the right to be abusive to the gimps that work for these faceless corporations that only see results and not consequences. I sell over the phone myself, but in a business to business capacity, I would never ever call someone at home in order to sell them something, its not big and its certainly not clever.

[MadduckUK]

You are really Batman, right?

Saracen wants to get called by the president so he can save the world. But he just keeps wining trips to Disneyland?

[Rave]

oh fine, but when i say it, suddenly i'm a racist, english hating, haggis eating, social reprobate with a penchant for wearing a tartan skirt with nothing under it but my socks.

Edited, I meant British people.

[Dareos]

Oy, dont try bringing the rest of the british isles down to your level

[kickstart 1]

Guys,guys,guys, calm down . It was meant to be funny not start WW3 !

[autopilot]

For my part, I didn't say I thought it was easy, and I'm not bitching about just any old cold calls, but cold calls to ex-directory numbers on the TPS. Doing so is illegal, and if someone has bothered to put their numbers on the TPS, they have taken the trouble to explicitly opt out of cold calls. Anyone that still makes such calls does so despite having specifically been informed the person doesn't want calls, yet they call anyway. They deserve whatever they get as a result.

I would agree with that, providing during the interview the employer explicitly stated to the prospective employee"Some of the calls you will make will be illegal calls to people registered with the TPS. Expect a lot of grief and abuse, ok?" and the employee replied, "I have job offers coming out of my ears, but this really me. Bring it on!".
But the thing is that i would bet my life 99% of the people working in these grim back street phone farms don't have a clue if you are on TPS list or not. They are just given a list to dial from or simply just connected to a call made by a mass dialer.

And who are they? There is 2 distinct discussions going on here, at least there should be. There needs to be a distinction. One about who crap cold calling is and the arse companies that do it, which will all universally hate, and about giving random abuse to an individual employee.

Employee's that almost certainly don't realise what they are doing is illegal or wrong and just told it's fine by the spineless bosses who probably dont pick up a phone all day.

A very patronising response. Unless you know my circumstances, you have no idea of how inconvenient answering the phone might be. Do you know my age? Do you know if I'm disabled? Do you know if I, or a loved one, has a serious medical problem. Do you know if I work from home, and some telemarketeer pestering me might mean that business calls can't get through and I lose work because of it? And so on.

That was a touch patronising, i hope im not being too patronising either. But just to add, you could flip that over and say the same to the poor sod with the crap job. What if the poor woman had been left by her husband, or maybe he died, that week and had to take this lame job to make end meet to feed the kids? I could give an endless list of examples, but you see what i mean. The chances might be low, but probably on a par with the chances of them phoning someone who could badly do with being left alone due to a terrible illness. And i think the abuse on some of these sites are worse than "would you like to hear about our amazing offer?". And like i said, i bet they have no idea about the TPS. When i did it i had a very quick interview (the staff turn over is ultra high) and was not told about any TPS (never even heard of it then) or any kind of complaints procedure. I lasted about a week.

I take the trouble and cost of having two phone lines - one a general purpose line, and one a private line. There are less than a dozen people that have that private number

If you have gone to all that trouble, why not go the extra yard and get phone with caller ID. If it's "Number Withheld" it's a safe bet it's Acme Window Blinds again. My mother has one at her house with ringtones you can assign to numbers (like on most mobiles), including one for call's with no CID, so she does not even need to go pick up the phone.

So, Saracen, you're not rude to people who stop you outside the supermarket. I take it though that you spit in the face of door-to-door salesmen who interupt your dinner, and tell them roundly to get the **** off your property? Because IMO that's even more disruptive than phoning you.

That was the example i should have made, that was my point. (not that for 1 second would i think Saracen would do that).


It's annoying, but apart from non-UK calls, random number dialers and the possibility you have a recycled phone number thats on a list (happens a lot), or given the number away by mistake when you signed up for something, there is not other real way of them getting your number (you can by lists off the net). So now they have it, all you can do is change the number.

Guys,guys,guys, calm down . It was meant to be funny not start WW3 !

Lol, yeah. But we are al Hexus buddys here, no harm meant, just a bit of banter really. In all fairness, some of them are quite funny. But i would never do them myslef!

[Uncle Psychosis]

I don't want to be dug out of the bath (yes, it's inconvenient),

Dont answer the phone when you're in the bath then, BT provide a free answerphone service these days.

and I don't want to have my dinner interrupted, or my favourite TV program interrupted either, for that matter.

So for these people having the sheer audacity to interrupt Big Brother you get to abuse them?? If you just said "sorry, im not interested" it would take you even less time than bothering to abuse them...

I will quite deliberately make the experience as thoroughly unpleasant for them as I can .... and I feel absolutely justified in doing so.

I just like being rude to people sometimes

I find it quite amusing that some people are so petty as to abuse people for something as trivial as phoning them.

Just out of interest, do you abuse people that knock on your door to sell you things? Or are you just a "telephone warrior"?

Sam

Edited cos I possibly stepped over the line. Apologies.

Zak edit: thank you very much for editing it I appreciate it v muchly :-)

[Knoxville]

I find it quite amusing that some people are so petty as to abuse people for something as trivial as phoning them.

Sam

The telephone is a rude invention we tolerate every single day, if someone you didn't know stood in the corner of your dining room and made a loud incessant noise until you relinquished whatever you were doing to talk to them I imagine you'd find the whole thing less than trivial, especially if it happened two or three times a day.

[finlay666]

The telephone is a rude invention we tolerate every single day, if someone you didn't know stood in the corner of your dining room and made a loud incessant noise until you relinquished whatever you were doing to talk to them I imagine you'd find the whole thing less than trivial, especially if it happened two or three times a day.

QFT

It peeves me off no end today, I started work at 7 so left the house at 6:30am, finished at 5pm (including 2 telemarketer calls at work), get home and make food, bout to eat and the phone goes off 3 times (admittedly one was my sister, but that is still 2 phonecalls, one from a car garage we no longer use and have explicit instructions not to call again) and an hour later from being tied up on the phone my blooming food was cold, and soggy (the vegges were nice before the phone went off)

I just finished work....I don't want to spend almost 12 hours a day talking to strangers if I only get paid for 11 of it! (and I work in a shop so no cold calling etc)

[Dareos]

The telephone is a rude invention we tolerate every single day, if someone you didn't know stood in the corner of your dining room and made a loud incessant noise until you relinquished whatever you were doing to talk to them I imagine you'd find the whole thing less than trivial, especially if it happened two or three times a day.

you watch QI too then?

[Saracen]

Dont answer the phone when you're in the bath then, BT provide a free answerphone service these days.

Do they? Wow. That might interest someone that wanted it, or was a BT customer. I'm not a BT customer .... as you'd know if you'd read my posts in this thread, instead of just jumping to conclusions about me abusing people.

Just out of interest, do you abuse people that knock on your door to sell you things? Or are you just a "telephone warrior"?

Again, I've already answered that, as you'd know if you read what I said rather than just mouthing off with cheap insults about me being a "dick".

And again, as before, you make assumptions about my circumstances. I said I had a private line that few people have the number for, for a very specific reason. Calls that are supposed to come in on that line are important to me. But now you suggest I don’t answer those calls while I’m in the bath, just because telemarketers can’t show the courtesy to obey the law and not pester people that have explicitly said they don’t want to be pestered. The people that have that number are important enough to me to get out of the bath for. Telemarketers are not.

Oh, and I notice that you quote PART of what I said, and pick up on trivial points like getting my dinner interrupted, but totally fail to respond to my main point, which was that telemarketers have no idea how inconvenient calls may be, because they have no idea of the personal circumstances of their victims, such as their age or medical condition. Maybe if you're young, fit and healthy you don't find answering unwanted calls inconvenient. But just because you seem to not find it so, it's arrogant to assume nobody else does either, and you certainly don’t have the right to assume that I have to cheerfully put up with illegal calls just because you don’t mind them.

Seriously, if the total inconvenience and outrage of having to answer a telephone and say "sorry, I'm not interested" turns you into some kind of maniac who has to abuse the person on the other end then I dread to think how you handle real problems...

So for these people having the sheer audacity to interrupt Big Brother you get to abuse them?? If you just said "sorry, im not interested" it would take you even less time than bothering to abuse them...

Big Brother? Do me a favour.

And where did I say I abuse them? You jumped to that conclusion, and accused me of it in post 25, and several other people have since jumped on that bandwagon.

If you look back at my first post (post 4), you'll see the type of response I use.

I said it again in post #14

So no, I absolutely will not "have a little sympathy". All anyone has to do to avoid getting the rough end of my temper is to not pester me on the phone. In the meantime, the more of their time I can waste, the better I like it. I view it as a social service, preventing them during that time from pestering other people that merely want some peace and quiet at home after a hard day at work, not pestering calls from these selfish leaches that pester people DESPITE it being illegal and unwanted.

The only time I referred to abusing people was VERY carefully phrased. Find it and read it if you don’t believe me. But I did NOT say I abused people. You accused me of that.

You'll also see I referred to making things as unpleasant as possible for telemarketeers. But how do I do that? Well, generally, and if I have the time and am in the mood, by wasting as much of their time as possible. Do I resort to puerile insults? Nope. But if I can waste their time, it'll hurt far more than a few rude names. I figure that if cold-callers have no qualms about inconveniencing me or wasting my time, why shouldn't I inconvenience them or waste their time? Fair's fair, after all. And again, as I said earlier, all a cold-caller has to do to avoid me wasting their time is DON'T CALL ME. Respect the law, and don't call me.


Are you a cold-caller by the way? When you said

I have to agree. Its just not nice getting abused for 8 hours of the day :-(

Get TPS people!

Plus, after about an hour on the job my coworkers showed me exactly why you should be nice to people who know your name, phone number, and probably your address...

it certainly makes it sound like it.

In case you missed this as well, I'll repeat one more thing I said earlier - I have no problem with people making cold calls provided they respect the TPS and any specific instruction from a customer not to call them. That, as I also said earlier, was my gripe with BT. Despite repeated requests, including written requests, they kept calling me to try to flog me services. It's why I took them to the information Commissioner via a formal complaint, and why I am no longer a BT customer. So BTs "free answerphone" service isn't much consolation since (though not recently) they were one of the biggest offenders, in my experience.

Oh, and I notice that you quote PART of what I said, and pick up on trivial points like getting my dinner interrupted, but totally fail to respond to my main point, which was that telemarketers have no idea how inconvenient calls may be, because they have no idea of the personal circumstances of their victims, such as their age or medical condition. Maybe if you're young, fit and healthy you don't find answering unwanted calls inconvenient. But just because you seem to not find it so, it's arrogant to assume nobody else does either, and you certainly don’t have the right to assume that I have to cheerfully put up with illegal calls just because you don’t mind them.

[Saracen]

I would agree with that, providing during the interview the employer explicitly stated to the prospective employee"Some of the calls you will make will be illegal calls to people registered with the TPS. Expect a lot of grief and abuse, ok?" and the employee replied, "I have job offers coming out of my ears, but this really me. Bring it on!".
But the thing is that i would bet my life 99% of the people working in these grim back street phone farms don't have a clue if you are on TPS list or not. They are just given a list to dial from or simply just connected to a call made by a mass dialer.

But it isn't the call recipients problem. The law about cold calls is there for a reason. A lot of people find it seriously intrusive, and for some, it can be a real problem.

For instance - some people, especially some very elderly, can get quite confused quite easily. They are able to live on their own, and wish to do so, but can be bamboozled on the phone, and are likely to agree to things (such as a salesman's visit) by a pleasant voice on the phone. So relatives arrange for TPS, which SHOULD block such calls. But some cold-calling operations don't see fit to respect that, or obey the law.

Another situation - you're a service engineer and you work a lot of nights, but are on 24-hour call four days out of seven. When at home asleep, you turn off line 1, and line 2 is the emergency call-out line. So, you've been at work all night, you get home, turn off the standard line and go to bed. An hour later, the "emergency" line rings, waking you up. And it's a flaming cold-caller.

Yet another situation - you've got both parents in a hospice suffering from the final stages of terminal cancer. At any time of day or night, you may get a call from the hospice warning that they think the end is imminent. Every time the phone rings, you jump. Is this the call? This may sound like an obscure hypothetical situation, but it is not. It happened to me. Both parents dead of cancer, 19 days apart. And BT's contribution? Never-fecking-ending pestering calls.

[Saracen]

...... But just to add, you could flip that over and say the same to the poor sod with the crap job. What if the poor woman had been left by her husband, or maybe he died, that week and had to take this lame job to make end meet to feed the kids? I could give an endless list of examples, but you see what i mean. The chances might be low, but probably on a par with the chances of them phoning someone who could badly do with being left alone due to a terrible illness. And i think the abuse on some of these sites are worse than "would you like to hear about our amazing offer?". And like i said, i bet they have no idea about the TPS. When i did it i had a very quick interview (the staff turn over is ultra high) and was not told about any TPS (never even heard of it then) or any kind of complaints procedure. I lasted about a week.

I don't agree that it flips.

On the one hand, I get pestered, despite emphatically not wanting it, having stated so and the pestering being illegal. On the other hand, the "poor woman" takes the job and makes the call. I am not my brother (or sister's) keeper, and have enough problems without accepting any vicarious liability for other people's ills. The ONLY way I can contribute to this "poor woman's" problems is if she calls me. The same is not true in reverse. Unless she calls me, I won't add to her problems in any way.

As for the abuse on the sites you mention, I haven't looked at any of them, so I can't comment. I can only comment from my own perspective, which is that LEGAL cold-calling doesn't give me a problem. It's not a job I would do, but if someone wants to do it, fine. Just respect the law and don't call TPS registered people, or be prepared for people's reaction to not be appreciative if they do.

[Saracen]

If you have gone to all that trouble, why not go the extra yard and get phone with caller ID. If it's "Number Withheld" it's a safe bet it's Acme Window Blinds again. My mother has one at her house with ringtones you can assign to numbers (like on most mobiles), including one for call's with no CID, so she does not even need to go pick up the phone.

I didn't go to that trouble because of cold-callers, but because I value my privacy and peace and quiet. I don't see why I should pay for caller-id just to block cold callers, and besides, quite a few of my friends have their number withheld .... as do I. I have no wish to block them. Or is this yet another inconvenience we're supposed to put up with because some cold-callers can't or won't obey the law?

[Zak33]

I just like being a dick sometimes

BANG OUT OF ORDER

I will NOT have someone called that in such a rude,and harsh manner.

I've been called a Dick many times,mainly for comedic value.....and it's funny then.

But frankly that was bloody rude. Uncle.....I'd like that deleted by you, from your post pls.

Thank you.