So if I hired someone to follow you around in public and gently but constantly poke you with a stick you would treat this person well simply because I was paying them? You're just happy they have a job?
At what point is a person responsible for their job/career? Regardless of whether it was a choice or not, if your job is to annoy, harass, and manipulate people, those people being angry and treating you like shit is just an occupational hazard.
If the alternative for that person is being homeless and starving, probably yeah. Or at least I wouldn't be pointlessly malicious toward them while fending them off.
interesting take, while i agree with @erokar's sentiment of not being unnecessarily malicious towards the telemarketer, in your scenario I'd probably call the cops after politely tell your employee to bug off :)
Have some empathy. Regardless of how this person got to their decision, you may be justified in the right to be annoyed, but why not choose to be kind?
Also people complain about telemarketers so much, but how many calls are you really getting a day from them? Also, how many times has one really interrupted something important you were doing?
They're just sales people whose business meetings happen over the phone.
Yeah, you COULD treat your waiter like shit (angry customers are just an occupational hazard), but that's a shitty thing to choose to do, outside of extreme situations.
> Yeah, you COULD treat your waiter like shit (angry customers are just an occupational hazard)
What waiter? A telemarketer is not a waiter. I choose to go to a restaurant. And if my waiter's service is bad, I can always leave, or complain to their manager. If the service is bad enough - like, oh, for instance, the waiter wastes my time by taking my order and telling me an hour later that they ran out of the thing I ordered - I might even be entitled to some compensation (a discount on my next meal, etc.)
I can't complain to a telemarketer's manager, and while I can hang up, I can't prevent them from calling me again, and I'm sure as shit not going to get compensated.
Great, this is just the solution Verizon offered me, after the service rep acted like nobody on earth had ever called in to complain about robocalls from Cardholder Services.
The problem is that robocallers often spoof the telephone number from which they call. It looks to me like they change the false, spoofed number about once a day. Given that I get 2, 3 or 5 calls from "Rachel" or "Ann" or "Microsoft Tech Support" a day, that's a lot of spoofed numbers to block
In short, not a solution, except from a narrow, legal standpoint.
If you're on Android, you can whitelist inbound calls using a freemium app called Mr. Number[1]. I'm not sure there's anything even remotely like it on iOS.
If you're using a VOIP service, ymmv. Before I switched to Ooma, my previous VOIP provider allowed you have a whitelist. So basically anyone not in my contacts got bounced to voicemail, and my phone would not ring at all. Ooma's call blocking is obtuse and manual, but it's half the price of my last provider, and the call quality is way better. An unfortunate compromise, I guess.
As for land lines, I used to use a now discontinued device+software called a Phone Valet [2] connected to an unused Mac. It basically acted as an answering machine/lightweight IVR. My phone would ring once so that the caller ID could get picked up by the device, and then based on a set of rules, my phone would either continue ringing, hang up (on known telemarketer numbers) or redirect to voicemail (everyone else). It was a pretty neat device, but I guess the decline of the landline led that product to be EOL'ed.
I didn't say that telemarketers are waiters -- just that you have the option to also treat them like shit for making a mistake, but most people more readily view that for what it is: you being unkind.
Also, you choose to have phone service. One of the things that comes with that is the possibility you will be called by someone you do not know.
You CAN also complain to people in charge of telemarketers.
You also CAN prevent them from calling you again. There is relevant legislation, there is precedent, you have technological options (another user mentioned these, with links), you're just not exercising them, and choosing to be rude instead, hoping (possibly rightfully so) that that will deter them.
> You CAN also complain to people in charge of telemarketers.
I've literally never, not once, had a telemarketer admit to me on whose behalf they were calling. It's always an instant-hang-up.
> There is relevant legislation, there is precedent
Again, I need to know who to point the long arm of the law at, and at best, it's very hard.
> you have technological options (another user mentioned these, with links)
That are easily circumvented by moving to a different number. (And now, maybe I've blocked my doctor's new number, or my mother-in-law's, or who else knows whose.)
> choosing to be rude instead
Yeah. I am. Fuck 'em. To use my 10-year-old's response, "they started it". It's rude to cold-call me and sell me something without knowing whether I could even use it - I don't need aluminum siding on an apartment I rent. It's doubly-rude - criminal, in fact - to call me despite me being on a do-not-call list. It's extra-flavored criminal to call me pretending to be Microsoft and to ask me to install malware on my device.
The absolute worst I could do is keep an honest person on the line and baffle them. As I said in my original comment, that's not cruel. It's rude at best.
You are absolutely free to be rude when you want. I am not saying you should never be rude to a telemarketer, but it's not warranted to be rude in every single situation.
My problem with the tone in this thread is that everyone is seemingly groupthinking on how to best use their pitchforks to hunt telemarketers.
The ones that are doing shitty stuff should be dealth with, but if your response to every single telemarketer (whether they are doing the really evil stuff, or just calling you at 3PM), is not reasonable.
Start from this perspective, it is the caller who is being rude, the caller who responds to kindness with additional rudeness, and the caller who wants to take money from you. Kindness doesn't work in this case.
They are calling from huge banks of numbers in my own local exchange, Ohio, Florida; you can't just block all numbers. I get 5-10 per day. They won't reveal who they are working for in many cases, so there is no one to complain about. The whole idea of being called by someone you don't know is at risk, and we are going to have to switch to a clean list, instead of a block list.
The best solutions just make it much more expensive for them to do this. What it does have to do is cost the company money, and increase total utility by preventing them from wasting others' time.
Yes, the caller has done many rude things. There is no point, however, where responding kindly is not an option. You always have a choice on how to respond.
Also, I'm not against making this more expensive for telemarketing companies, I'm just against this particular means, and the seemingly prevalent groupthink that every telemarketer on the end of any phone line is a scumbag trying to harm you and your family in any way possible.
Also, all you're going to do is start an arms race. If it become profitable for telemarketing companies to hire developers to find ways to detect this "solution", things will just go back to the way they were.
Could you help us understand, which companies are using telemarketing to sell legitimate services that some customers want? And why don't they clearly identify themselves and respect the customer's concerns (not just reading off a script)
Oh, please. They are spoofing their phone number and violating the US telecommunications act by calling me on my cell phone.
This is not the same as treating a waiter like shit.
In fact, I not sure why this is considered treating them like shit. They will be talking to someone no matter what. Does it matter if they keep repeating themselves to one person or a bunch of people?
> Also people complain about telemarketers so much, but how many calls are you really getting a day from them?
In one of the interviews, this guy says he was getting 4-5 telemarketing calls a day, some of them asking for someone who had the number many years ago.
Responding in kind is not always a great solution. Also, it is not the case that telemarketers are not capable of also employing computers to more efficiently bother you.
At what point is a person responsible for their job/career? Regardless of whether it was a choice or not, if your job is to annoy, harass, and manipulate people, those people being angry and treating you like shit is just an occupational hazard.