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

[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.