Slashdot Mirror
Dave Barry Strikes Back Against Telemarketers
ikkonoishi writes "The Miami humor columnist Dave Barry in his column
here encouraged his readers to exercise their constitutional rights to call a telemarketing firm which had declared the National Do Not Call List unconstitutional. Well it seems to have worked." Needless to say, the targets of the prank were none so keen on being called themselves.
But what do you do when they call you using the terminally broken "predictive dialing hardware"
You answer and there's nobody in the call centre available so you get a silent call. I've had 5 of these in one day. As the caller id is blocked I can't even discover which set of brain dead idiots it is calling.
My, what a crafty troll. I think I'll bite.
I can see the immediate appeal of this kind of puerile action, but in the end you're just sinking to the telemarketers' level.
Ok, so here your basicly saying that what the people who called the telemarketing group did basicly the same thing that the telemarketing group did, pick up a phone and call someone. Because thats what the telemarketers say, we are just calling you.
Dave has interfered with these people's ability to make a living.
You I could come back with something on this but Dave allready did it so well, I'll just quote him: "Of course, you could use pretty much the same reasoning to argue that laws against mugging cause unemployment among muggers," he wrote. "But that would be unfair. Muggers rarely intrude into your home."
Do the ends justify the means? No. This is the kind of dangerous thinking that brings abortion clinic bombings, the ongoing fighting between northern and southern Ireland, the danger in the Middle East, and countless other bloodbaths.
You go from talking about ends justfying means, and your argument there is weak at best, to bloodbaths? Unless someone was beaten over the head with a phone I don't think any blood has been spilled here.
Dave's had his fun and done his damage.
Ahhh, the "damage". Well again back to the orignal point we basicly now have a law that says that if you sign up for the National Do-Not-Call list that these people can't call you. Such as it is you could then argue that that law is doing "damage" to them. I mean it will, hopefully, reduce the number of calls that a "business" like this one can make and thus force it to lay off or close up shop totally. But, we as a people have decided that we want to be able to control who calls our phones that *we pay for*. And on top of all that, this company has said that it's unconstutional for such a law to exist! Now IANAL, much less a consitintuonal scholar but if any of these lowlifes could please point out to me where the right to protect a buissness model exists I'll be glad to take my words back. Such as it is however that is simply not the case.
Laugh if you must, but sit back and don't make this any worse than it already is!
I did laugh, thank you. How my "sitting back" when I did it made it worse I'm still a little confused about.
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
Now, I assume you were trying to be funny, but clearly some tool on here took you seriously and modded your post interesting instead of funny, so I'll reply.
Good. Let people lose their jobs. Interfere with their attempt at making a living. If they inconvenience me one iota, I couldn't care less in the slightest if every last person there lost their job. Its a job. They can get other ones. If they can't, well our government has shown we'll bend over backwards to support people with no ability or desire to support themselves.
They choose to call me, they choose to inconvenience me and you or they claim their ability to make a living should matter? Thats funny beyond words. What if these were ignorant asshats sending 50 million spam messages a day? Would shutting them down be bad because its going to put some people out of work?
Even if you only get a recorded message, they pay toll fees for every incoming call. Once you start hearing a busy signal, their cost is zero.
What the telemarketers count on is the ability to sell things to people who have a hard time saying "no." These people do not want to be called, but they also lack the willpower to tell someone to go away. Those folks *love* the idea of a do-not-call list, because it keeps them from having to deal with the confrontation of saying "no." But, it's exactly those people that the telemarketers make the most money off of, so the telemarketers desperately want to keep access to them.
Exactly what I was thinking.
A "logical" business model would be not to waste time on a customer who won't be interested so go elsewhere where there is money to be made. However, the tactics of some telemarketers/ing firms involve coersion or a play on the emotions of the telemarketee.
That, my follow readers, is the true evil behind telemarketing and IMO justifies having Do-Not-Call lists.
To-do List: Receive telemarketing call during a tornado warning. Check.
Your mixxing laws and terminology here.
There is a dramatic diffrence between a Slashdotting and a DDOS. A Slashdotting is when many people are directed to visit a website and do so. The resulting load of lagit visiters causes the server to overload.
A DDOS is when a bunch of people send garbage packets to the target server. The resulting load clogs the network and keeps lagit users from visiting the website.
When a bunch of people call a 1-800 number to complain they are making lagit phone calls. This is Slashdotting it's perfictly legal.
When a bunch of people call and hang up or call and ask "If your fridge running?" or similar prank calls then your DDOSing. This isn't legal.
And let's be clear on this. DDOS is hacking is applicable to the Internet and the laws binding to computer networks.
The applicable law for calling a voice line and hanging up is not hacking but harrasment.
So it all depends on what you say when you call. If your calling in protest you need to state your opposed to the companys possition that "cold calling" is protected speach.
But if you just call and say something goofy and hang up that's harrasment.
Yep they have your name and number but more importantly if your violating the law they can get your name and number from the records no matter what with a simple cort order. Caller ID blocking won't work here eather. The phone company has your records and will give them up with a cort order in a phone harrasment case.
I don't actually exist.
Sigh, okay if they spend their time answering the phone that can't spend it calling/making money. If they answer the phone for an outraged citizen they can't take a sales call. When there lines are getting inbound traffic they cannot do outbound traffic.
So this did hurt them. How much depends on what profit margins these companies have. I know there are plenty of business were one lost day of work can make the difference between a loss and a profit. So keep it up.
Oh and the claim about lost jobs doesn't work. These telephone sales people are taking the jobs of shop sales people.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Of course it's ok. This is a group that does business with the public. The number being called was listed as a public contact number. It was made available so people could get in touch with the ATA and register their comments. That's what people were doing.
Nobody gave out the home telephone number of a given telemarketer. Nobody sent mailbombs to the company, or tried to break in and cut their phone lines.
People were just trying to make their opinions known to the company in a legitimate manner. The only thing out of the ordinary here is how many tried at once.
the reason they are worried is that they make a majority of their money from people who know they don't want whatever the telemarketer is selling, but can't say no. whether because they're too nice, or don't like conflict, there are a lot of people who find it hard to say no to a person talking to them on the phone -- especially since the telemarketers have perfected having an answer for every imaginable excuse.
i was surprised about their objections to the do-not-call list, too, until i saw several articles pointing this out. makes me hate the bastards even more....
-esme
You're missing a few key points.
One, it wasn't the telemarketing companies that were getting the calls, it was the association that represents them. While industries are huge, the associations behind them often employ less than a dozen people, and rarely more than fifty. So if thousands of people start calling, it's a hell of a telecom slashdot effect.
Two, whether they normall make money answering the phones or not is immaterial. We don't make money answering the phone when at home, but we still find it disruptive and annoying to get calls from telemarketers; this is the same concept. The goal wasn't to keep them from getting profitable calls, but rather to turn the tables on them, using their proposed "First Amendement" model of justified harrassment.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
I worked at a call center in Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada. Let me tell you that people like you made my day working there. The way it worked is that as long as the customer kept giving you excuses why they can't buy the product you had to keep giving them reasons around it. Once the customer repeats an objection you can then just end the call.
I've had calls like yours and the whole time I sat there with a grin on my face trying to come up with ways around your insane compaints. These calls were so much fun and most people there would trade these stories with each other and laugh. The rest of the time your job is mind numbing and repeditive.
Added to this I would like to say that annoying telemarkers may seem fun but these people are almost always in a bind and do not want to work there either. Making a single mother's life hell when she's resorted to working for a call center because she can not find anything else is not going to solve the problem.
You know, the first amendment doesn't guarantee you an audience...
If I walked down the street and cornered people and asked them to give me money, would that be illegal? Especially if I essentially ignored their refusals and became rude, aggressive and demanding?
I'd wager that at minimum they'd bust you for agressive panhandling, perhaps someone might even stretch it into a form of mugging or robbery.
And this is exactly what telemarketers do. On the street, the more aggressive and strong-willed people would walk away or otherwise rebuke them and walk away, but I'd bet that the same people who are bullied into buying from telemarketers would fork over money to someone just demanding it on the street.
What amazes me is why the media doesn't spend more time and effort exposing this "sales technique" for what it is. Surprisingly most articles on DNC lists focus on the "irritation" of the calls, or worse, the untold damage to be done to our economy through the loss of telemarketing jobs. None of them seem to focus on the decepetion, bullying and probably outright fraud associated with telemarketing.
In my mind is inextricably linked to the same business ethos that fueled Enron, WorldCom and host of other "lying your way to wealth" business models that seem to have prospered.