Person or group of people just sitting down to a meticulously prepared meal. All excited and ready when…
Ring…Ring…Ring
“Hello?”
“Hello, this is Mumbler from such and such and have you considered refinancing your house, buying new windows, changing phone services lately?”
Now you can register for the national “Do Not Call” list which will eliminate up to 80% of those pesky phone calls for people in the USA.
I did this as soon as it became available here…worked like a charm.
Before that I simply refused to answer the phone when I was at the dinner table. That was the coolest thing because it reprogrammed me to not jump as soon as a machine said jump. Liberating.
That branched out to not reading all the emails…especially the ones that are forwards from friends…not reading messageboard threads after I’m done with them or ones that I don’t care about. . .and that moved on to not reading message threads from people who purposefully put in lousy subject lines…
The whole thing has saved me grand amounts of time/keystrokes/annoyance.
Q:
How soon after I register will I notice a reduction in calls?
A:
If you register by August 31, 2003, you will start receiving fewer telemarketing calls by October 1, 2003. If you register after September 1, 2003, telemarketers covered by the National Do Not Call Registry will have up to three months from the date you register to stop calling you.
(end quote)
They haven’t obviously diminished in our household yet …
I think Tyghress is talking about one of the State lists. Something like 27 states had already implemented their own D-N-C databases before the Feds got around to it.
The bad news is that only some of the State lists were automatically incorporated into the Feds’ list. Some States either refused to share data, dragged their heels or used incompatible data formats. So for safety sake, even if you were already on a State list you shoul register with the Feds anyway.
The Fed list doesn’t take effect until 10/1/03. I signed upin the first 24 hours - had to wait until after midnight local time for the site traffic to die down. At one point they were getting over a thousand hits a second!
I think it’s a shame that so many people are going to loose their jobs.
I am a former telemarketer. And I don’t think it’s a bad profession per se. It feeds a lot of kids who otherwise would go hungry. And robs a lot of old ladies who can’t speak English.
When I first notice that a telemarketer is on the line, I just quietly lay down the receiver (but don’t hang up) and let them waste a few moments talking to the air. (The punishment fits the crime, and it seems to be a deterrent.)
What a great solution!!! I hate hanging up on them, it’s so impolite, but I don’t want to hear their spiel either.
I’ve also been tempted to tell them I’m busy and then ask them if I can have their phone number and call them back later. I wonder if I would ever get one.
When I first notice that a telemarketer is on the line, I just quietly lay down the receiver (but don’t hang up) and let them waste a few moments talking to the air. (The punishment fits the crime, and it seems to be a deterrent.)
You guys got it all wrong. It’s actually a good thing to just leave the phone there. This is because (at least in my experience, I suspect it’s the same at other call centers) you get paid for your total talking time. A lady I used to work with got 40 minutes of talk time before they came back and hung the phone up. I usually just go on to the next call, though.
If you leave the phone sitting there, I can keep reading my script and the computer doesn’t register that you’re not there. It shows up on my screen as time I spend talking (the goal is to keep you on the phone as long as possible). The worst thing you can do is hang up the phone. That cuts talk time sharply.
It’s not a deterent because the person never actually calls you. Your call comes up from the computer’s list and s/he just talks to you. Being a telemarketer you never ever ever actually dial a number or know who you are calling before the computer tells you.
madfifer, If you ask for a number to call back, where I worked I’d give you our number but you couldn’t speak to me because you’d be calling customer service and we were the sales deparment.
An ex-partner of mine had a wonderful way of handling this. She would say very politely, I’m just about to sit down to dinner, but if you’d like to leave your name, phone number and dinner time, I’ll call you back then.
I get particularly annoyed by those people who use my name in a way that insinuates that they already know me. I respond by asking if they’ve cleared this interview with my manager. When they bluster, I reply ‘So you don’t really have any idea who I am do you? You don’t seriously think I’d talk to you for nothing, do you?’ They don’t ring back.
This leaves a dilemma. It helps the telemarketer who is just a person trying to make a living doing a thankless job but it also keeps the company calling you back because a sale wasn’t made.
I think the list is great and signed up ASAP, but a couple of things to keep in mind -
It doesn’t include calls from charities and political groups and
It doesn’t include calls from companies you already do business with (i.e. have a credit card from, etc). And in this day and age where like 2 companies own everything, that it an important fact to keep in mind.
Also, remember that if you tell a telemarketing company when they call to take you off of their list and not call again, they can’t. That is even true for collection agencies.
Also, remember that if you tell a telemarketing company when they call to take you off of their list and not call again, they can’t. That is even true for collection agencies.
That’s the ticket!
When you realize it is a telemarketer, don’t hang up! Very nicely ask them to place you on their ‘do not call back’ list. They are requirred to do this and can be fined heavily if they violate this law.
Of course once you register and it goes into effect, you won’t have to do this, except with those exempt from the new law.
If you get pissed at them and just hang up, they’re gonna call back, so play it smart and ask to be put on the list. It works.
Long before these state and federal lists were created, each company had to maintain their own list (as has been mentioned by a couple of people already). Therefore, what I always did was just read them my script as soon as I figured out they were a telemarketer (or pollster, or whatever). It wasn’t hard to figure out, since they can never pronounce my last name correctly. I would just say “I’m sorry, but I don’t accept telephone solicitations. Please take me off your call list.” When you do this, not only do they not call you back, but they generally don’t sell your number to other companies. After a couple of months of doing this, I was hardly getting any calls any more, so when the Pennsylvania state list was implemented (and we got on it), I didn’t really notice much of a change. I probably don’t get more than one call every month or two now.
I’m usually polite to telemarkets but we all have our limits. I hit mine last week when Sprint, with whom I do business, called me to pitch local service and unlimited long distance to me. It wasn’t a bad offer. But, I have a thing about not accepting any offers from telemarketers and so I declined. The next day, someone else called me and started the same pitch. I politely told him that I had already been called about the offer and had declined. He started asking questions like, “well, did this person explain to you…” xyz. He wouldn’t quit. So, I told him that when I had informed him that I had been called twice in two days he really should have apologized for the intrusion and moved on. He argued with me and told me that obviously if I had declined the offer, someone had not done their job in explaining it to me. Anyway, I wasn’t so polite after that.
I’m really not unsympathetic to telemarketers’ employees. It’s a job. Probably not anyone’s first choice for a job. Other than calling me during dinner, they are usually courteous enough people and they handle "no"pretty well.
Incidentally, NPR had an interesting commentary yesterday in defense of spam. I didn’t exactly agree, but I thought he had a point, which was–why are we picking on unsolicited email advertising? How is that worse that direct mail clogging our mailboxes, tv & radio commercials, etc.? I’d like the opportunity to tell the guy that, in the case of direct mail, I don’t have to worry about my 13 year old daughter getting an ad in the mail inviting her to buy a product to enlarge her penis.
I just signed up, I take anything that NPR says with a grain of salt. They’re either playing devil’s advocate or telling you what to think & if you don’t agree your a horrible insensitive person. I think that’s it’s own li’l form of dogma -
