A handy how-to guide of sorts

[go_team]

(summarized in a comment to boojum's journal, expanded here because I'm snarky like that)

Really, phone solicitors start out with a strike against them when they have the misfortune to call a phone I'm answering. But there are a few sure-fire ways to make that bad situation even worse, for instance:

1. Waking me up.
2. Calling me by Peter's last name. Today's second caller went for "Ms." instead of "Mrs.", but that's not much of an improvement. I know his is the only name listed for our number in the phone book, but in these modern times it's really not that unusual to have people with different last names sharing an address, so what the hell? Maybe they were trying for a personalized approach, hoping I'd respond positively if they correctly guessed my name? I wonder what the expected value is on that kind of thing: me, I grew up learning to spot telemarketers and their ilk by their manglings of names, and as mentioned above tend to default-hostile towards telemarketers anyway, with an extra dose of snark if they get my name wrong. Ramble ramble ramble... Any which way, it was 9 AM and I was trying to sleep in for just a little longer, despite the cat's best efforts. Sigh.

I really don't want to be a bitch to phone solicitors, really. I wish I could be just be civil. Rationally, I know they've got a really sucky job, and the sooner I can squeeze "put me on your 'don't call' list" into the conversation, the sooner I can get on with my life and they can stop wasting their time with me. But ugh. Two calls in one day that rubbed me so very the wrong way is a lot.

Comments

[harobed.livejournal.com]

Someone woke me up the other day. I think it was the day I got back from vacation and really just wanted to sleep for 16 hours. I think my reason for not wanting to change my long-distance was that "I am asleep". Your post just made this memory come up in my mind, maybe I'm making it up.

[goteam.livejournal.com]

We don't have a phone set up in the bedroom (yet), so I had to get up and wander through the house to get this call. I thought it might be about one of the students I was scheduled to meet at 10 and 11 today. Boy was I pissed to find out I'd gotten up for nothing, so to speak. Grrrr.

[boojum.livejournal.com]

My father's first name is John. My mother ended up on one mailing list as "Ms. John Lastname". She hasn't ever gone by the Miss Manners-approved, but silly, name of "Mrs. John Lastname" either.

I still haven't figured out why some phonedroids can't pronounce "Arlo". Unfortunately, phonedroids sometimes call with messages we need from banks and such, so I can't just hang up on phonedroids immediately. Unless they're recorded phonedroids, which I thought was illegal but seems to be fairly common.

Several times a week we get calls with nothing there. If the answering machine gets them, they hang up after about three seconds. If I get them, I eventually hang up. I'm not entirely sure what's up with those.

Anybody who doesn't respond to "Hello" with "Hello, I'm xxx and..." or "Hi, is yyy there?" or "Hi, Kim?" (or even "Hi, Bob?"), but instead responds with a several-second pause or an unadorned "Hello" is a malevolent teledroid and can be hung up on immediately.

I try to be civil to phonedroids of all sorts, but I don't regard interrupting with "I'm sorry, we're not interested. Put this number on your do-not-call list. *click*" to be uncivil. I do think interrupting a person face-to-face is uncivil, though, and door-to-door people tend to have long spiels before they pause for breath. *sigh*

[pmb.livejournal.com]

Those nothing phone calls are telemarketing companies. Previously, they would have each telemarketer dial each number. Now the system is to take the average call length, divide by the number of people working, and dial one call every interval, and hope that the telemarketer will be available. When that system breaks down due to too many wordy people and calls taking too long, you get the empty phone phenomenon.

[boojum.livejournal.com]

I had heard that before, but this seems like an astonishing proportion of empty calls to non- (somewhere between 1:3 and 1:1, I'd guess). I suppose it doesn't cost them anything to send empty calls. Ick.

[bagoffarts.livejournal.com]

There is also a system that will dial a chunk of numbers and whichever the first one to pick up gets the telemarketer. No brains behind it at all. If you are lucky enough not to be number one, you get the call same time next day. For some reason I was getting calls at 3am every day for about 2 months while at mudd, I never really could explain that.

[kuddliphish.livejournal.com]

I had heard that these nothing calls were a type of survey where a machine calls a bunch of numbers and records which ones get an answer. The company doing this then sells this list to telemarketing companies so that they can have a real person call back at the same time another day and have a better chance of catching you at home. This could just be baloney, though.

[goteam.livejournal.com]

My dad's name is Jan, which is a perfectly acceptable Dutch first name but gets turned into the female name a fair amount by people who don't know better. He also gets turned into "Jon" a fair amount, but that's common enough (and close enough to the correct pronunciation of his name) that it's not a dead phonedroid giveaway. It's made for fun times in the past when school directories and the like listed male parent first, then female parent, and parsed "Jan" as the girl's name, and "Anneke" (my mom's) as male in response. Like my dad, I've learned that using my initials whenever possible is a good way of getting people to stop mispronouncing your name and maybe even ask what you'd like to be called.

I read somewhere that those calls that turn out to be nothing are often due to telemarketers: there are automated systems that pre-dial numbers for them at a certain rate based on the average length of a call or something like that, but no way to pause the machine when a call runs over the average time. Or something like that. They could also be junk faxes discovering that you don't have a fax machine. (Oh, how I hate junk faxes. But I've discussed that in another entry.) Or they could be wrong numbers from people too shy to actually ask if they've gotten a wrong number.

[boojum.livejournal.com]

*laugh* I had a friend in spingroup who said, when a marriage and last names conversation started, that she and her husband would have been really stupid to try to have the same last name, given how confusing "Jan" and "Janet" were already.

Some junk faxes just beep at you. Or your answering machine. At 2 AM. Virginia got that one regularly in a studio apartment with no way to hide from the answering machine. I'd guess it has something to do with the intelligence of the originating machine.

Especially when I was down near Mudd, it was often easy for me to tell a wrong number, either from or to me, by the languages I don't speak. A few of them also could tell by my voice in "Hello" that I was the wrong person, which was fairly impressive.

[olstad.livejournal.com]

We got a solicitation phone call the other day that said and I quote:
"Thank you for answering our call. Please call ***-**** to hear...."

They wanted US to call THEM so they could sell something to us. Honestly. We said no thank you and hung up.

[springbok1.livejournal.com]

When my sister gets calls for Mrs. or Ms. Herhusband'slastname, she politely informs the telemarketer that they must be mistaken, because Mrs. Herhusband'slastname lives in Massachusetts.

[goteam.livejournal.com]

I didn't even get that far. When they asked for Mrs./Ms. Notmylastname, I said "No" and they were perplexed. The first one shifted into the gear of asking to speak to "the man or lady of the household", and I was too tired to think of explaining that there's one man and two ladies in this household; instead I said, "You're talking to me. What are you selling?" The next one asked if he'd called the Notmylastname residence, and I said, "Peter is one of three people who lives here," but I don't know if I successfully conveyed the point that not everybody lives in a nice little nuclear family with all one last name. Sigh.

[iainuki.livejournal.com]

Now that I think about it, when I answer the phone at my parent's house (not as often these days, more common when I was at Mudd) and they ask for my father, I often did confuse them by saying, "I'm not him." My usual second line, though, was "I'm his son," which most of them seemed to be able to wrap their minds around.

"'You're talking to me. What are you selling?'" I'll have to remember that line for the next time I take a telemarketing call at a residence that isn't mine . . .