Want to drive a telemarketer crazy and amuse yourself at the same time? Here’s an example of how to do it.
The secret, apparently, is to make every third or fourth yes mean something entirely new through the magic of inflection—but you’ll have to stay committed to it even when the telemarketer catches on, which may result in a self-inflicted insult.
“How to torment telemarketers with one word” [YouTube via Neatorama]
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I don’t get a lot of calls from telemarketers but when I do there are a few responses:
1. Give phone to one of the kids. This was more fun when they were 4.
2. Hang up.
3. Say No and then hang up
4. Ask them to hold (not my dime) and put the phone down and walk away.
5. Tell them I’m robbing the place
6. Ask them to hold, load a game up and let them enjoy the sounds of tanks and machine gun fire.
Not my fault they got a crappy job and that they decided to call me.
I boycott Walmart; should I feel guilty that I’m depriving its employees of some income? Should I feel terrible for wanting to see Best Buy go out of business? Wasting a telemarketer’s time is the only way I have to hurt the telemarketing firm’s bottom line. Verbally assaulting a telemarketer is not cool, but wasting their time sounds fine to me.
All this toying and teasing and messing with telemarketers is taking up YOUR time.
So what? I waste time every day; nor is the time wasted, because you might get a funny story out of it, or a sense of accomplishment to replace the “Stupid telemarketer!” feeling which can hover over us temperamental types. Besides, the irritation of a telemarketer (for me at least) isn’t the time lost talking to them, it’s the scrambling for the phone and the disappointment.
Not everyone bills by the hour.
@Coles_Law: Holy cow, if you’re giving away your last 4 digits of your SSN, gimme! I need a new identity…
Yes..Yes…Yes…uh oh hot dog.
I pulled this off a couple of minutes ago. The conversation went basically the same as the one in the video, except she wanted to verify the DOB and she didn’t call me a moron at the end of the call. She did say, however, that if I wasn’t going to verify that she would be forced to discontinue the call.
Oh well. Boring conversation anyway.
“The time wasting and intrusion most of you resent is minimized by “No thank you” – click. All this toying and teasing and messing with telemarketers is taking up YOUR time.”
True, but it’s time well-spent, and I go back to what I’m doing laughing rather than angry that some douchebag interrupted me.
Many of you don’t like telemarketers, I don’t either. I also don’t like the sample people in the aisles of grocery stores. I don’t like being asked to sign up for an discount card at every retail store I shop at.
Different animals entirely. You can walk right by the sample people without any incident, and the discount card pitch takes one second while you’re already in line. Telemarketers, on the other hand, interrupt a really good meal, or my favorite movie, or distract me and make me lose my last life on the final boss of a really hard game. And they’re doing it to scam money off of me by selling me useless products for more than they’re worth in deceptive ways, or soliciting money “for charity” and keeping the lion’s share for themselves. They’re irritating, they’re annoying, and they’re scuzzbuckets.
The constitution doesn’t guarantee the right to go through life without irritation.
The constitution also doesn’t guarantee telemarketers a 3-minute handle time.
I agree with Starfury, if you ask them to hold and just leave them hanging, it costs the company money but it doesn’t waste you of your time. And you won’t leave a telemarketer crying, they’re probably already suicidal anyway.
I used to work for a company that did outbound sales calls. I sold credit cards for a grand total of about 4 days. It was the worst job I’d ever had, and not just because of the cold-calling. The management was crap, we were treated poorly, never rewarded for doing well but always punished if we messed up. In my lifetime I’ve walked out on only two jobs (I’ve had many!) and this was one of them. I didn’t even walk out on McDonald’s!
@SkokieGuy: “I am not arguing to support telemarketers. I wouldn’t mind if the industry dissapeared. I am simply arguing that we live in a mean ugly world where the impersonal nature of the internet has created a shift where it is okay to be hostile to strangers.
They’re inconveniencing me, I’m going to inconvenience them. This isn’t personal, it’s business. I’m going to turn myself as irritating as possible to be put on the “hostile” list. I’m not going about it to be cruel, I’m doing it so they leave me alone. Don’t believe in the “hostile, do not call list” do you? I never signed for up for a DNC list and have had my telemarketing calls drop to near zero, even political BS calls have stopped for the most part. The ones I get are the desperate, and I abuse them mercilessly to maintain my rating.
I don’t hate them, nor am I into cruelty. The simple fact is: it works really freakin’ well at severely limiting the calls.
@bobbleheadr: it would, except they usually hang up when you start saying that or the words “do not call list” so that they don’t have to actually go through the act of removing you from the list.
Caller ids and ditching land lines don’t help for long. Finnish telemarketers have already switched to calling cell phones and calling from normal not secret numbers. The bastards even call from cell phone numbers and try to hide the fact that they are selling something.
I’m tempted to make the next caller help me test my fire alarm, but I’m just not that cruel. I may just come up with an improvised audio play where something horrible happens in the background.
Fail.
My favorite encounter was getting an illegal pushpoll call during a local election campaign that I was administering.
“excuse me sir are you voting in the next *** election?”
“No I am not.”
“Well can we at *** ask why not?”
“because I’m the chief election officer and I only break ties.”
“Click”
Being nice to telemarketers assumes that they’ve called you at a time which is not inconvenient for you.
I used to work 12 hour night shifts, and EVERY telemarketing call woke me up.
When this happens several times a day, I do get a bit cranky. Imagine getting telemarketing calls at three in the morning. Would you politely say “I’m not interested, please remove my name from your list, thank you, have a nice day”?
My husband is so danged nice saying no even to the boiler room “law enforcement” non-charities that I just know I’m a horrible person by comparison. But he does tend to go nuclear on the occasional pollster. “I have to choose between candidate “A” or “B” only?” “You’ve just asked me 14 questions about Iraq and now you want to know if I take a cholesterol medication?”
I’ll give telemarketers this – you generally can figure out what they want from you, and in the first 60 seconds of the call.
@SkokieGuy:
I get telemarketing calls on my home phone, on my cell phone, all over the place. They refuse to hang up unless I hang up on them first.
What *should* happen is that they *should* be legally liable for the use of my time over the first minute or so. I’d be happy to talk to them for an hour after my first “Sorry, I’m not interested” if I was pulling my standard $50/hr consulting fee, especially when they’ve called while I’m on a job.
I frequently point out that it isn’t even *legal* to telemarket to my cellphone number, and their answer seems to be to simply call back from a different number.
What’s far worse, though, is bill collectors. The telemarketers at least leave my voicemail alone – but the bill collectors will leave ten minutes long diatribes. I’ve tried being nice and telling them that Joe Foozle is not at this number many times. I’ve tried being a little more firm with them.
The real kicker, though, was when I finally got sick of it and spent a good three minutes or so screaming at one of them – to which the response was “Well, you don’t have to talk to me like that.”
There’s a reason we do these things – I’m perfectly nice to most telemarketers, and I try to be patient with the six-year-old-phone-number bill collectors, but they REFUSE to stop calling. Perhaps if they paid attention when we told them not to bother us, we wouldn’t constantly belittle and berate them.
@nsv:
Totally forgot about that one!
That’s easily the most irritating call to get. Especially when you’ve JUST gone to sleep at 6 or 7 AM and they start wardialing you at 8. Even worse when you’re on call and can’t simply take the phone off the hook.
@RvLeshrac: If I’m not feeling particularly creative, my “go-to” method of dealing with telemarketers is to tell them that they are calling my business line, and that I do computer troubleshooting and support over the phone. My rates are $75 for the first minute and $35 per minute after that. Then I tell them that the clock is running, and I will be happy to talk to them about whatever it is they’re trying to sell, but I need to get their billing information first. Whatever they say, I just keep telling them, “I’m sorry, I need a valid form of billing information before this call can continue any further,” and maybe give them occasional updates on how much they owe me.
@stacye: Not sure if this applies, but since it was a survey the do not call list might not apply, the do not call list only covers commercial enterprises. Scientific and sociological surveys are excluded and some have truly random dialers. I worked for a survey place for one day. So if it was some organization collecting data on behalf of the insurance industry or something then it was probably not affected by the do not call list.
well usually I ask to be taken off the list. If they call back again, I either hang up or deal with them HARSHLY. For some time I would get calls, always from a different man with a thick asian accent asking if Jeff such and such was there. Every day. For 2 weeks. I explained this was the wrong number multiple times. Of course I got pissy.
skokie, it is acceptable to make fun of people. Sorry. And I feel no remorse. If you are a telemarkerter, this is part of your job because everyone hates your phone calls.
Maybe one day companies will realize I am more likely to like them if I never have to deal with BS from them. For example: Amazon: The only time I hear from them is: receipt, shipped, package. Best Buy: still emails me stupid offers (although I boycott BB for other reasons too)
@biswalt:
I don’t think anyone seriously minds the real, legitimate survey calls. Unfortunately, it gets harder to tell the real surveys from the fake “We’re just asking questions to lead into a sales pitch” calls.
that was funny.
Priceless, simply priceless. I would have ended with “No, but your job is moronic” *SLAM*