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.
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?
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.
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.
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...