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

[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.