Usually, the people who write to us are besieged with calls from telemarketers or companies they’ve done business with, and want us to help make it stop. Brett is on the other side of the phone line. He’s not the traditional telemarketer you might think of, calling ordinary citizens during dinner: his company is just business-to-business, and he was doing some cold calling to drum up business. The person who answered the phone was anything but businesslike.

Brett sets the scene:

My name is Brett, and I work for an Electronics Recycler in [redacted]. I happen to work in sales, where we call B2B to see if they need our services of pick up and recycling of unwanted electronics.

Cutting to the chase: This morning, I made a routine phone call to a business in [redacted] County that does lighting sets. The guy who answered the phone decides to put his own spin on telling me to never call again,

“Never f*cking call here again!”

I found that thoroughly unprofessional, not something I would expect from a lighting business. So I decided to Email the CS email there thinking it would get somewhere, right?

Wrong. It comes to the same guy I talked to, who thinks its great to troll me and put me down as a worker and an employee as well as a person. The Email is below.

Moral of the story: If you get on the horn with someone still from a small biz, you will get nowhere by replying via Email.

This is the Email I sent:

[To the owners],

I am forwarding a complaint to each of you in regards to [redacted]. I was calling to ask about electronics that are no longer of use that needed to be removed for recycling purposes, and I was directed to hang up and never call again with quite vulgar language.

I would hope that you have a very professional business and staff there at [redacted], but the use of vulgar language on a B2B call is far from being professional. While we have no problem complying with No-Call requests, the use of abusive and vulgar language is something that should not be tolerated, and something I do not tolerate myself in a business setting.

While I have my own opinion of what will be the outcome of this, I am simply bringing this to your attention so that something positive may come of this.

Thank you for your time.

This is the Email sent back by the same person whom I talked on the phone with. Note: I have called them exactly 5 times in a 12 month period. This is borderline beyond unprofessional:

Sir,

Please stop acting high and mighty. You’re a telemarketer, and no matter what our needs were, I would never give such an outfit any of our business.

Your call is unsolicited and I don’t know how many times I’ve hung up on your company in the past. Please take the hint.

If you don’t like the language, don’t call here again. Let’s see how long you can resist before your boss makes you sit back down at the phone bank.

Sincerely,
[Redacted]

Anyone who has ever dealt with telemarketers at work empathizes with the guy who picked up the phone, but it sounds like Brett isn’t quite the boiler room stereotype.

It would be one thing if the lighting company had ever done business with Brett’s company in the past, but after five refused calls, they’re probably not about to become treasured colleagues. Still, is there ever a good reason to swear at anyone in a business setting…especially someone in the same region who could (who knows?) need your product someday.

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