A fed-up consumer's tips to avoid the dreaded telemarketers
Column: Gimme Some Grammar appeared in Fort McMurray Today Oct. 13, 2006
By MICHAEL HALL
Today staff
There was a time when I didn't get too many telemarketers calling my house.
I assumed it was because the firms doing the calling were in big cities. With long-distance rates chewing up the budget, perhaps it would be less attractive to dial us here in Fort McMurray.
That limitation is now gone: with Internet-based telephone service moving into the mainstream, we get calls from far afield, the accents on the callers sound like they're calling from a wide range of Third World countries.
I get lots of calls. I assume most of you reading this do, too.
I've tried all of the tricks:
- Say "just a minute," then put the phone down for the next 30 minutes. Believe it or not, the caller was still there once. When he heard noise that indicated I picked up the phone, he started yelling at me.
- Say "put me on your do-not-call list." Some do, some don't.
- Check your caller ID to see who is calling. Oops. I don't have caller ID.
- Try to reason with the telemarketer. Most are very rude.
- Simply hang up. This is very rude. I have to admit this is what I do for the most part, however.
I don't want to hang up. Contrary to my reputation, I'm not a mean guy. But it's the easiest thing to do.
Telemarketers are people, too. The people who call are regular Janes and Joes, trying to make a buck. If it's a Third World country, they're likely trying to make a buck or two a day.
Jerry Seinfeld had a bit in one of his shows. here's one version:.
"Tell the telemarketer you're busy at the moment and if they give you their phone number, you'll call them back. The telemarketer will say, 'We're not allowed to give out our number.' You say, 'I guess you don't want anyone bothering you at work, right?' The telemarketer will agree. You say, 'Now you know how I feel!'"
The ultimate fantasy is to construct an argument that will force the telemarketer to see the utter fallacy of what he or she is doing and quit the job on the spot. That's never going to happen.
Edmonton Report (which morphed into Alberta report, then Western Report, went out of business, and is back in another form as Western Standard) was the king of telemarketing. The magazine's message, based on old-fashioned morality, had big loopholes: it sought subscriptions by bugging people at home. That's a morally questionable practice, in my view.
Its telemarketers were especially tenacious; they were ready and willing to debate issues when they called me.
When I'm at home, I don't want to debate. That's part of my daytime job.
Now Western Standard is up to the same tricks. I've been solicited at least twice by their telemarketers in the past year.
They have a script at the ready if you try to politely put them off. I don't feel bad hanging up on them.
The former federal Liberal government, for all of its failures, passed a law to establish a "do not call" registry. The job is now on the shoulders of the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission. They held hearings and invited comment earlier this year. I don't know when they'll unveil the registry itself.
I sure hope the Conservatives aren't eyeing this baby as a cost-cutting possibility. It will be worth its weight in gold.
Will the registry cull the offshore telemarketers? I'm not sure.
This is the precise thing we look to our governments to take care of.
With the Conservatives coming through on laws to limit the excesses of the payday loan industry, this is another area where they can do some real good for average Canadians.
- - -
Fall is here. The leaves turned, then hung around for a while, but they fell to the ground in big bunches on the weekend.
Winter is coming.
I'll put it this way, instead of dreading winter, I'm looking forward to spring.
- - -
Everybody's talking about it.
Construction on Highway 63 through town is out in the open and on the tip of many tongues.
At the regional council meeting this week, Coun. Jim Carbery took the optimist tack: he praised how well the new lights at the bottom of Thickwood Boulevard are moving drivers to their destinations.
He's right.
A pessimist out there might gripe about the overall slowness of every portion of the project: from the almost-finished Beacon Hill/Gregoire Park intersection, to the almost-but-not-quite-finished Thickwood Boulevard link, to the unknown downtown bypass.
A reporter asked, and was told, the project is on schedule. It's on schedule until it's behind schedule, I guess.
If you asked local McMurrayites if it's behind schedule, you'd likely get a different view.
One aspect of the job is really ticking some people off.
With new pavement on Beacon Hill -- wasn't that stretch paved about eight years ago? -- many drivers treated the road as if there were three lanes all the way up to the Beacon Hill turnoff.
When lines were finally painted on the asphalt, the clear message is that vehicles in the right lane should merge left, then go back right to turn a few hundred metres later.
It's obvious the lines were dictated by someone who doesn't know local traffic patterns.
Will the province, who is in charge of the project, reconsider? Stay tuned.
© Copyright 2006, Fort McMurray Today.
By MICHAEL HALL
Today staff
There was a time when I didn't get too many telemarketers calling my house.
I assumed it was because the firms doing the calling were in big cities. With long-distance rates chewing up the budget, perhaps it would be less attractive to dial us here in Fort McMurray.
That limitation is now gone: with Internet-based telephone service moving into the mainstream, we get calls from far afield, the accents on the callers sound like they're calling from a wide range of Third World countries.
I get lots of calls. I assume most of you reading this do, too.
I've tried all of the tricks:
- Say "just a minute," then put the phone down for the next 30 minutes. Believe it or not, the caller was still there once. When he heard noise that indicated I picked up the phone, he started yelling at me.
- Say "put me on your do-not-call list." Some do, some don't.
- Check your caller ID to see who is calling. Oops. I don't have caller ID.
- Try to reason with the telemarketer. Most are very rude.
- Simply hang up. This is very rude. I have to admit this is what I do for the most part, however.
I don't want to hang up. Contrary to my reputation, I'm not a mean guy. But it's the easiest thing to do.
Telemarketers are people, too. The people who call are regular Janes and Joes, trying to make a buck. If it's a Third World country, they're likely trying to make a buck or two a day.
Jerry Seinfeld had a bit in one of his shows. here's one version:.
"Tell the telemarketer you're busy at the moment and if they give you their phone number, you'll call them back. The telemarketer will say, 'We're not allowed to give out our number.' You say, 'I guess you don't want anyone bothering you at work, right?' The telemarketer will agree. You say, 'Now you know how I feel!'"
The ultimate fantasy is to construct an argument that will force the telemarketer to see the utter fallacy of what he or she is doing and quit the job on the spot. That's never going to happen.
Edmonton Report (which morphed into Alberta report, then Western Report, went out of business, and is back in another form as Western Standard) was the king of telemarketing. The magazine's message, based on old-fashioned morality, had big loopholes: it sought subscriptions by bugging people at home. That's a morally questionable practice, in my view.
Its telemarketers were especially tenacious; they were ready and willing to debate issues when they called me.
When I'm at home, I don't want to debate. That's part of my daytime job.
Now Western Standard is up to the same tricks. I've been solicited at least twice by their telemarketers in the past year.
They have a script at the ready if you try to politely put them off. I don't feel bad hanging up on them.
The former federal Liberal government, for all of its failures, passed a law to establish a "do not call" registry. The job is now on the shoulders of the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission. They held hearings and invited comment earlier this year. I don't know when they'll unveil the registry itself.
I sure hope the Conservatives aren't eyeing this baby as a cost-cutting possibility. It will be worth its weight in gold.
Will the registry cull the offshore telemarketers? I'm not sure.
This is the precise thing we look to our governments to take care of.
With the Conservatives coming through on laws to limit the excesses of the payday loan industry, this is another area where they can do some real good for average Canadians.
- - -
Fall is here. The leaves turned, then hung around for a while, but they fell to the ground in big bunches on the weekend.
Winter is coming.
I'll put it this way, instead of dreading winter, I'm looking forward to spring.
- - -
Everybody's talking about it.
Construction on Highway 63 through town is out in the open and on the tip of many tongues.
At the regional council meeting this week, Coun. Jim Carbery took the optimist tack: he praised how well the new lights at the bottom of Thickwood Boulevard are moving drivers to their destinations.
He's right.
A pessimist out there might gripe about the overall slowness of every portion of the project: from the almost-finished Beacon Hill/Gregoire Park intersection, to the almost-but-not-quite-finished Thickwood Boulevard link, to the unknown downtown bypass.
A reporter asked, and was told, the project is on schedule. It's on schedule until it's behind schedule, I guess.
If you asked local McMurrayites if it's behind schedule, you'd likely get a different view.
One aspect of the job is really ticking some people off.
With new pavement on Beacon Hill -- wasn't that stretch paved about eight years ago? -- many drivers treated the road as if there were three lanes all the way up to the Beacon Hill turnoff.
When lines were finally painted on the asphalt, the clear message is that vehicles in the right lane should merge left, then go back right to turn a few hundred metres later.
It's obvious the lines were dictated by someone who doesn't know local traffic patterns.
Will the province, who is in charge of the project, reconsider? Stay tuned.
© Copyright 2006, Fort McMurray Today.
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