How To Make Friends on the Telephone

Dan writes "What a wonderful find--it seems since the internet, we've forgotten the correct way to communicate with people. So here is a book to teach us the proper etiquette, as well as how to handle complex modern communications devices."

Comments

Re:telemarketers

[Michael Spencer Jr.]

That gives me an idea for an interesting use of VoIP/Asterisk: drop one of these guys into a fake extension that plays a continuous audio loop that sounds like a phone that's been sat down on the desk, with someone looking for their credit card, without tying up your phone or phone line so you can still receive calls.

Step 1: get a VoIP account from someplace like VoicePulse or Nufone.

If you use Inter-Asterisk Exchange to connect to their service ("IAX termination"), something interesting happens: even though you have only one inbound phone number, multiple calls into that number each get their own VoIP connection. So yes, 100 people could call you at the same time and saturate your Internet connection with VoIP traffic.

This also means your provider doesn't handle call waiting or anything like that for you: you need to tell Asterisk how to handle multiple calls where your phone is already busy. You can be simple and just go straight to voicemail; you can do fancy stuff like transfer to a phone queue ("All representatives of the household are currently assisting other telemarketers. Please hold, and your call will be answered in the order it was received.") or to an IVR ("If this is an emergency, press 1 to have me paged." etc) or anything you want.

Step 2: Record an audio loop of someone sitting the phone down and looking for their credit card.

Set up your Asterisk box with a special-purpose extension for recording audio from your telephone. For example:

exten => 732,1,Wait(1)
exten => 732,2,Record(telemark:wav|0|0)
exten => 732,3,Hangup

Put that in a context that your inside telephone can access but outside callers calling in can't access, and then pick up your phone and call x732 ("REC"). You'll hear a beep -- then immediately set the phone down and play-act like you're looking for your credit card. Remember, you're going to be playing this audio in a loop, so if you say anything longer than a word or two, your target may figure out he's listening to the same thing over again.

Phone reps will probably mute the phone so you can't hear them and then do something else while they wait. If you rattle the phone, or make noises that sound like maybe you're coming back to the phone, or maybe you just bumped the phone by accident, they'll have to pay a little more attention and can't tune you out completely while they wait.

After you've got 20 or 30 minutes of audio on there, hang the phone up. Then go find the wav file in /var/lib/asterisk/sounds/ and open it in an audio editor, and trim out the beginning and end where you picked up and/or put down the phone.

Step 3: Create a 'trap' extension to park telemarketers into.

Again in a context you can access but outside callers can't, add an extension:

exten => 3845,1,Playback(telemark)
exten => 3845,2,Goto(1)

Use Playback instead of Background because you don't want the system to react to button presses -- you don't want them dialing their way out of your trap and back onto your phone.

Then, when you get a telemarketer call, string them along as per the parent post, and then just transfer the caller to extension 3845 (or whatever arbitrary extension number you pick) and hang up. Then your phone line is free, and the caller hears your recording in a continuous loop until they hang up.

If it's legal in your area (one-party-consent state), you could even record the call while playing that loop. Just change that part of the dialplan to something like:

exten => 3845,1,Monitor(wav,telemarketer-trap-recording)
e xten => 3845,2,Playback(telemark)
exten => 3845,3,Goto(2)

and then if you're bored, load the files up in an audio editor and skip to the loudest sections, to see if you caught them saying anything interesting. :-)

(I can't believe I just sat here and wrote all that. Yes, I'm at work, and I'm bored. :) )

Have fun!

--Michael Spencer