On the drive back from San Diego last Sunday night after an exhausting day of moving our son from one college dorm to another for summer school, I heard a woman being interviewed on the radio about how she deals with the growing problem of unwanted telemarketing calls. She discussed her investigative skills in digging up details about the company making the call; like their CEO’s name, address and even personal telephone number. Once she has this information, she then posts it on her own blog and invites readers to call the CEO, preferably during the dinner hour. Oh, my. And well done, ma’am!
This woman also has the tenacity to send invoices to the offending companies for the amount of time they usurp from her day at a rate of $500 an hour. (I’m assuming she is an attorney by profession.) Surprisingly, during her radio interview, she claimed to have been paid many thousands of dollars over the course of the last five or so years.
While I can‘t imagine having the cojones to do either of the above, I applaud her efforts to fight against this contemporary plague of menacing marketers. Last year I wrote about daily the calls I had been getting on our home phone from various people representing this or that home improvement contractor. Every call begins with an almost identical pitch; “Is this James Chase? James, I talked with you back in January about projects that you might be considering around your house. You asked me to call you back after several months and you might be ready to talk.” If I don’t simply hang up on the offending caller as soon as I hear my given name, I ask the person why they think I would ever do business with someone who lies to me with his very first call? Buh-bye.
A year later, these fine folks are still calling at least a half dozen times a week. And they’re not alone. Our home phone (with its supposedly unlisted number for which I pay AT&T extra every month) has been receiving an increasing number of unsolicited calls every day. And yes, I’m on the national “No Call” list. Big whoop. That worthless legislation has more loopholes in it than Bill and Hillary’s wedding vows. Case in point: I’m answering endless calls from “marketing partners” who have obviously been given my private contact information by either So Cal Edison or the Gas Company and who try to sell me some sort of energy efficient, green-this-or-that program to help lower my utility bills each month. The delicious irony here is that, I already know of a surefire way to lower my utilities – cancel my home phone. That alone would cut more than $50 off my monthly overhead.
The latest almost daily annoyance is from an irritating robo-recording whose first words are “Do not hang up!” I have no idea what the pitch is going to be for because, of course, I immediately hang up.
But the telemarketer who wins the mirror ball prize for demonstrating the ultimate in chutzpa, is the firm who called me just yesterday. I answered our landline like I always do and – after a few second pause – heard the following recording, “This is an important offer from XYZ Company. All of our representatives are busy helping other customers right now, but please stay on the line and someone will be with you shortly.”
I kid you, not. I almost didn’t hang up so I could learn what company had taken the art of interruption and irritation to unprecedented new lows. I say almost because after listening to music-on-hold and a second and third message reminding me to hold on for an important message, my attitude flipped from curious to furious and banged the handset down.
Next time they call, however, I’m going to stay on hold and invoice them for my time. I’ll see you ‘round town.
As my kids will attest, I have three immitigable personal quirks (okay, at least three). One; I can’t walk past a light switch without turning it off if no one’s in the room. Two; an outside door left open during the winter while our heater is running or in the summer while the air conditioning is on pushes every penny pinching, energy conserving button in my body.
And three; I simply cannot let a phone ring without answering it.
I can’t stand to even let voicemail pick up a call because I know how many people – my own kids included – simply hang up rather than leave a message.
I’m sure there’s some deep, disturbing psychological neurosis responsible for this character flaw. Lord knows a handful of skilled therapists have been able to purchase vacation homes just from analyzing oddities of my personality that are too numerous to mention here.
Last week I wrote about the inordinate number of unsolicited calls we’ve received for months now made by telemarketers with nearly identical pitches selling home improvements. As much as these incessantly interruptive calls drive me crazy, not answering them would be even worse. Trust me on this. To not answer a phone is to wonder if one of our kids in some far-flung territory is in dire trouble and needs rescuing. Or maybe that call was from an attorney representing an unknown relative who recently died and left us their entire collection of priceless Pokemon cards. Or it could have been a personal call from Barack Obama wanting to have a beer with me and discuss the state of race relations in our new American utopia. The problem is, you just never know.
My wife always has some sage comment like, “If it was important, they’ll call back.” To which I usually answer, “Seriously? What if they can’t? What if terrorists were about to abduct them and they only had ten seconds to make a call before murderous thugs broke in and that call we just missed was the one chance they’ll ever have to make a call for help and we never, ever, ever see or hear from them again. Huh? What if?”
See what I mean? My poor wife.
Sometimes I wonder if there isn’t some canine DNA in me. I mean, my hearing is so attuned I can hear a phone ring in the very back room of our house when I’m outside in the front yard, standing on the top rung of a ladder leaning against the roof, with the neighbor’s gas-powered leaf blower on maximum annoy, while a heavily loaded dump truck lumbers uphill past our house and multiple helicopters hover overhead covering the latest Southern California car chase. Oh, and every dog in our neighborhood is barking its head off as a pack of stray cats fight for territory in the bushes under my ladder. Is somebody gonna get that phone?!?!
As soon as I realize that nobody but me hears the ringing, I will risk life and limb to hop off the ladder, dive over the hedge and do a commando roll on the lawn, hop back up, dash through the garage and leap over various exercise equipment – coming dangerously close to altering certain body parts in the process – crash through the door into our family room, make a flying leap over the couch and in mid leap snatch the cordless phone from its charging cradle on the desk.
As I stab the “talk” button and hear the dreaded dial tone, I let out an anguished groan. Looking around, I suffer the pitiful smirks from whatever family members were present to witness my insanity (but apparently felt no compulsion to answer the phone themselves!). “They’ll call back,” my wife says. And sure enough, the phone rings again less than five minutes later.
And of course, it’s a telemarketer. I’ll see you ‘round town.
In the classic Buffalo Springfield song, “For What It’s Worth” the band sang, “There’s something happening here. What it is ain’t exactly clear.” Now, I don’t know if whatever’s happening is only happening at my house or throughout the entire Crescenta Valley. It could be happening all across L.A. County and even Southern California, for all I know. But what’s exactly clear is, I’ve had enough.
For the past couple of months, we’ve been deluged with unsolicited, unwanted and unwelcome sales calls to our unlisted home phone number. Unbelievable. We’re getting at least one, if not two or three of these calls every day and they’re all very similar in nature. Why, it’s almost as if the callers are reading from the same script. Nah, ya think?
Although there are two basic versions of the calls, each one begins identically. My phone rings, I pick it up and say hello. There’s a silent pause with some static. After I say hello one or two times more and am just about to hang up, I hear background babble of other voices making outbound calls from what I assume are countless cubicles filled with soulless headset-wearing telephone marketers. Within seconds, the soulless headset-wearing telephone marketer assigned to my number wakes up, and in a fake-friendly voice says, “James?”
Okay, there are only two people in my life who have ever called me James. One was my dear departed Father, who often preceded my given name with a choice expletive or two, followed by a detailed description of how I’d screwed something up beyond all repair or redemption. The other person is a great friend who calls every so often just to catch up. Ray called me this morning as I was writing this, in fact. When I hear his voice say “Well, James …” I know I’m in for a wonderful time of fellowship and reconnection. When I hear anyone else use my proper name, however, I know a sales pitch is coming.
In pitch version number one, the caller is someone who supposedly talked to me “back in January” about possible remodeling or roofing or painting or plumbing or landscaping, or ... well, I didn’t have any work for them at the time, but I supposedly asked them to call me back at the end of summer. Right. Sure I did.
In the second version, the caller excitedly explains that their company is finishing up working on one of my neighbors’ homes and only going to be in the neighborhood another couple of days, but because I’m fortunate to be in the same neighborhood, they’d like to give me a free estimate for any possible remodeling or roofing or painting or plumbing or ... you get the idea.
The first dozen or so of these calls I simply said “no thank you” and hung up. Then I just hung up. Eventually, I began telling my telephonic tormentors that I had already heard the exact same words dozens of times. Now they hang up on me.
This past Sunday as my wife and I were discussing an inspirational morning at church, our phone rang. You guessed it, Pitch Number One. I asked the pleasant sounding woman who interrupted our Sunday calm why she was telling me something that simply wasn’t true. Her tone instantly flipped from friendly to snarky and she actually said, “What am I supposed to say, ‘I lost my dog and want to come over and look for it in your yard?’” Then she hung up.
You’re probably thinking, why doesn’t he just let the phone ring? Yeah, why not? Well, as I’ll most likely write about another time, there’s an overwhelming, Pavlovian-like strand of my DNA that absolutely, positively must answer a ringing phone if at all possible. In other words, I’m a telemarketer’s dream. Unfortunately, it looks like they’ve found me.
I’ll see you ‘round town.
