I used to be a telemarketer. 1 -- Everything he says about what it's like to be the telemarketer is 100% true. 2 -- I relished calls like that. Anything to break the tedium.
Fall of '04, it was my first term in college, and I was hawking magazine subscriptions. The people we called were fun, but the co-workers; well... I'm gonna get stories from that for the rest of my life.
Rollins is right. I had to do that job once. Judge me if you will but I like having food in my mouth. I had an automated machine that dialed numbers for me. Cause the truth is after ONE horrible phone call in a job where I can only apologize and continue, you don't want to dial the number for a while yet BLEEP the machine has already called another poor souls home. 6 rubbish calls in a minute. 60 minutes in an hour. 5 minutes in and I want to jump off a cliff yet there is 1 hour and 55 minutes til next break. But every now and then you get that elusive person who is hilarious. If you act like Rollins towards one of those telemarketers. You would have made their day so much more interesting.
Where I live, if you are on a Do Not Call List and they call you anyway, they get fined thousands of dollars per call. Not sure how it works in America, but I have found that when I say "I am on the do not call list, and I will be reporting this call to them as soon as I hang up", they cannot terminate the call quickly enough.
Yeah, but if you end up on a list sometime, merely because you made one inquiry, you start losing a nice attitude about it. 6 years ago, I once did like 15 minutes of online investigating, pricing insurance for whatever, and ended up on a list, and received calls ever since. There is no blocking it, because the list is one, obviously, sold to whomever, whenever, and the incoming number is never the same. It's nothing short of harassment, and the 'marketer' is collateral damage. But face it, strange incoming calls with only cold call sales involved is low rung, shite. Unwanted,unsolicited noise. That's the way it is. Nobody wants to shake the porter's hand.
I worked as a telemarketer for a month one time. It was horrible. I was making outbound calls to the public selling them raffle tickets for the RSPCA. As bad as the job was I got one guy who was so hilarious. I asked him if he had any pets, and he was like “No but my wife is an animal in bed”. So if you get a call from a telemarketer, don’t be mean to them or anything, but just mess with them a bit in a good way. Trust me, as long as they have a sense of humour they will find it hilarious. Like this guy does. If I called a person like that I would find it hilarious.
I remember when Henry started his spoken word shows, people were like "what a Henry Rollins show with no music? WTF?" He would play the smallest venues and they would be nearly empty. Never would imagine he would pack theaters this size with his stories.
Yep, done that job; cold calling sales. I can say; we LOVE calls like this. People screwing about with us and having a good time really breaks up the soul crushing mundaneness that is working in a call centre.
another hilarious way to mess with scam callers is when they ask for your phone number or address: give them the address or phone number of your local police or sheriff's department. or if you REALLY wanna mess with them....the phone number or address of your nearest FBI agency.
@@chrispile3878 Ppl that have to take such jobs have already enough in their plates, maybe it's just me, but it's not cool to beat an already dead horse. Want to change things? ask for a legislative change regarding cold calling.
@@MalakianM2S It's already illegal in most states, and yet they call anyway. The persons in charge of the operation (not the callers) should be hunted down, killed, and fed to wild animals. What they do is literal harassment and fraud on a massive scale.
I'm always nice and polite to telemarketers. I show interest in their product or service, I agree to buy whatever they're selling, and then I give them a bullshit credit card number. When they tell me the number didn't work, I apologize and give the number again with one digit changed. When they tell me that one didn't work, I apologize and say I give the number again with one digit changed. And on and on, until they hang up or start screaming at me.
Tried to do the job once....lasted til first break. I can't figure out some people....after my dad died, they'd call, ask for him, and not even pause a second when told he was dead. "Well, then, you'll be interested in this offer...." Unbelievable! I should have done the Henry thing, lmao. Maybe that would've shut 'em up.
My favourite answer to telemarketers were: "Sorry, I cannot possibly do womething with your magazine (or whatever stuff they're selling), I'm deaf-blind, sorry." Or what works too: "Sorry, I have to begin a very long prison sentence on monday, maybe you could call me back in seven to ten years (insert nervous giggle, but stay absolutely serious the same time)"
I am never mean to telemarketers and cold callers because I know their job is much harder than mine and that's even if what they're doing is illegal -- my phone identifies them as fraud or marketing before I even answer it, anyway, and the first call is more likely to be from a computer these days.
I had one of those scam telemarketers call one time pretending to be Microsoft Tech Support, saying they wanted to do a remote takeover of my computer to resolve some malware issues I was having. I kept them on the line and talking while I pulled up Projekt Misanthropia -- an "experimental" album consisting of screaming mental patients and industrial machine noise -- and I put the phone on speaker, set it front of my computer speaker, and blasted the guy with it. He called back a few minutes later cussing me out. I just laughed hysterically.
Act excited , interested and ask them to hold so you can get your wallet then put the phone down and walk away. My record is around 15 minutes with the tele/Indian guy still holding.
I do not know what the US equivalent is, but in Asstralia, they have what they call the Do Not Call List. You add your name to it, and if telemarketers call you ever again from thirty days after you register, they get fined up the wazoo. I put myself on the list last year and I have not heard a peep out of them since. I cannot say enough nice things about the people who maintain the Do Not Call List. It is like they know that when you purchase a service and product like a phone, be it landline or mobile, you are the one who ought to have discretion over how you use it. Imagine that.
We have it but it means nothing. And like 90% "telemarketing" calls we receive nowadays are indian tech support scammers that really want Itunes gift cards for some reason.
aspie182 I worked in an Australian outbound call centre and almost all of the people I called claimed to have been put on the do not call list before. The list is real and you have to put people on it if they ask you to, but it still gets ignored.
Did you know that Sofia is the capital of Bulgaria? What's even more outstanding is their national flag, which is 3 horizontal stripes that have the following colors: white, red and green. In 1912 Bulgaria took part in the First Balkan War in which a coalition formed between Bulgaria, Serbia, Montenegro and Greece fought the Ottoman Empire for territorial gains and the independence of, the then non-existent, Free State of Albania. However Bulgaria was dissatisfied with its territorial gains and
I lasted one day in telemarketing. Was selling "AAA Limited" to Melbourne companies so they were the first company alphabetically in that category in the Yellow Pages.
I feel sorry for telemarketers, so I try and give them an interesting conversation as well. If they ask for my name I tell them I'm some dead singer like Freddy Fender or something and I go from there.
I did telemarketing for a week when l was a teenager. I think it was my first job ever. I was lousy at it and don’t think l sold anything. (I am a pretty introverted and non engaging person). My boss says to me on payday at the end of the week: well l can’t pay you this week, not until some time later. But, l can fire you, at that way you can be paid now. I said: fire me then.
Retook an offensive, this time against its previous Balkan allies for more territorial gains, namely Macedonia and a strip of Greece which was mainly inhabited by Bulgarians. However the Ottoman Empire re-entered the war, this time on the side of the Balkan league and even the Kingdom of Romania, which had untill then remained neutral, entered the war for its possible territorial gains. On these grounds Bulgaria was defeated and the Kingdom of Romania took the province of the Cardilater and then
I worked as a telemarketer for almost a year. Shittiest job ever. But I didn't know better (it was my first real job.) But if I got unemployed now, I'd rather stay that way than go back to selling crap over the phone that nobody wants.
Great technique. Once a young lady called from across the country to sell me something. So I asked her, "Where do you live? What time do you get off work? I'm coming over!" She started to sound scared, and I never heard from her again. Another time I got a call from a young woman in India. By the time I got thru with her, she wanted me to come to India so she could meet me. Can you hear the wedding bells chime?
I was a telemarketer for the local newspaper for a total of two days; let go because I didn't garner enough subscriptions. Then forgot my experience with that and went into the other direction; 'customer management' (inbound troubleshooting/billing/etc) for a total of five years with two different companies. Ugh. The work wasn't too bad, but the callers wanted A, the client company wanted B and the call center company wanted C, and I just had to quit due to a pending ulcer.
And yeah, I just mean that call cntr management didn't give a crap about the content of the call, or even if he sold a subscription, but that he spent too long trying to make that sale when he could have spent that time making several other sales.
If my job were cold calling people and I managed to get Henry Rollins on the line, I'd probably just ask him annoying questions about Ian MacKaye until he hung up on me.
He's at least half-right: I've worked in fast food, cleaned a county fair toilet (on multiple, separate occasions from when I was 15 to about 20 or so) and worked in better places for bosses I've been utterly contemptuous of...and I'll maintain until the day I die that being a salesman of any kind has got to be the most demeaning, awful, miserable fucking work I can ever imagine. I'm not telling anyone to be nicer to those guys. I'm telling you, it's not worth the money they promise.
You realise it would have taken less effort to read what I had written in the description than write that comment, right? Taken from the Shock and Awe DVD.
I'm like Henry, I don't badmouth telemarketers, I just dick with them for a bit. If they call, I pretend to act interested, and when they ask if I'm the head of the household/bill payer, I tell them to hold for a second. I simply put the phone down, without hanging up, and carry on with what I'm doing for like 10-15 minutes or so. If I feel like picking up and talking again, and they're still there, I just say I'm having trouble finding the head of the house, and I'll have to get back to them
