Intellectually, I recognize that the people making telemarketing calls by and large are in a precarious financial position, with all of the risks to health and happiness that come with that. I think we need to treat them better (even if that's just tersely hanging up, rather than stringing them on).
But viscerally, I can understand why we do this; my impulse, when on the receiving end of an unsolicited inbound call, would be to do the same.
Sometimes it is really hard to feel bad for them. I got a call from this woman selling some vacation package. I asked her to tell me more, and after about a minute or so, I told her I am not interested. She went mad, accusing me of wasting her precious time and that time is money for her etc etc. How am I supposed to make a decision without even knowing what she is selling? I wasn't even trying to mess with her, was genuinely interested in what she was selling. And this was an unsolicited call too.
Well, at least here in Canada, it works for those who follow the laws. It definetly lowered the amount of calls I get everyday day. The one that go through are either legitimate businesse I have relations with or scammers. The latter case you can just confidently hang up.
What I meant to say was - when I added my number at donotcall, the calls dropped by like 80%. I still get these calls sometimes, but it is much better now. So yeah, it works, but not 100%, but I am very glad something like donotcall.gov exists
>Intellectually, I recognize that the people making telemarketing calls by and large are in a precarious financial position, with all of the risks to health and happiness that come with that. I think we need to treat them better (even if that's just tersely hanging up, rather than stringing them on).
Those who steal are often not in the best of financial straights. Yet we still punish them. Those who commit even worse crimes are often meeting some unmet need or desire, one which may only exist because they are mentally ill, and yet this means we see them as a danger to society. We may pity them, but we will still punish them.
So, shouldn't the same logic apply even when the wrong being committed is much milder? The punishment will be milder (get yelled at, have time wasted) since the wrong is milder, but they still deserve the social repercussion of their actions.
Laws are not the only rules, they just have the strongest punishments if broken. Their are social mores and folkways which have weaker punishments if broken; punishments which are dealt out by many other members of society other than the legal system.
To put it another way, being extreme mean, rude, and condescending to and wasting the time of telemarketers isn't illegal either. Yet some are trying to say doing such is wrong, to which I say that the telemarketers have already committed a greater wrong of the same nature.
Many telemarketers are engaged in outright scams. I've listened to many of the recordings referenced by the article, and they're overwhelmingly the same kind of scam.
The basic idea is that they call you up and offer you something for free or at a steep discount. They explain that they need a small holding fee which will be returned to you, then they run off with your money and you never hear from them again. Free solar panels, vacation cruises, driveway sealing, and discount home repairs/weatherization seem to be the common flavors.
I do not think that one's job having the side effect of being an annoyance to others merits even subtle social punishment. Nevertheless, I often do act as if I did, because I do not always behave in accordance with my aspirations.
Remove for a second that this is a job. If I was going around interrupting other people just because I wanted to, I would deserve subtle social punishment to get me to stop annoying others, no? So why is it different if you are doing it for money instead of the pleasure gotten from annoying others?
The employer/instigator is shielded from social pressure applied via being a nuisance. High turnover positions get a very slight uptick in turnover? Good thing there are a lot of people out there that just need a paycheck no matter the amount.
If this were just an annoyance, you'd be right, but the primary effect is to make the job less profitable by lowering the number of sales per hour. That directly affects the employer.
I'd prefer not to waste the time of human employees on the phone because they're just minimum wage workers trying to earn a paycheck. My irritation is with the owners of the telemarketing company.
If the following fake recording[1] with the special 3 beeps intro actually works to fool robo-dialers, I'd rather the service do something like that. I also remember seeing a dedicated electronic box[2] that had that recording built-in. You either held it to the mouthpiece of the phone or it was wired in-line between the handset and the base. I'm not sure of the success rate of that device. I wouldn't be surprised if a developer attempted to replicate that device by making an app on iPhone/Android. Again, I'm not sure if pressing a smartphone speaker to the mouthpiece of a handset is good enough audio fidelity to fool robo dialers.
> My irritation is with the owners of the telemarketing company.
Sadly, the best way to do this is to make it less profitable for them to employ these business practices. And there are only two ways for you to do that: don't buy their products and force them to spend more money per sale (i.e. waste their time).
The employees are there to make calls. I don't see having to deal with a robot as wasting their time, since they are hopefully being paid regardless. Now, if they are being paid on commission, then they are part of the problem, and removing the incentive will help correct the annoyance.
I feel like we might be in a better situation if we had a strong social safety net for the unemployed instead of annoying me and scamming old people to support the otherwise-unemployed. (Don't forget to vote, folks.)
>I'd prefer not to waste the time of human employees on the phone because they're just minimum wage workers trying to earn a paycheck.
I'm still perfectly fine wasting their time.
Honestly, I don't get this reasoning that if they are doing it for a small financial gain, they are resolved of any blame for any harm they cause (even if the harm is just annoying me and wasting my time). Yet I see the reasoning being used in multiple instances where they are causing hassle or worse (say when they lie to you about whats in phone contracts, which is my pet peeve).
>I don't get this reasoning that ... they are resolved of any blame ... annoying me ... causing hassle
Yes, I agree that annoyance is being made and hassle is being caused but I assign the "they" part more to the owners of the businesses rather than the low-level employees working the phones. Those workers are just cogs in a wheel. Therefore, I don't derive any satisfaction of justice by making employees suffer the games of an AI Turing Test. On the other hand, I am happy when business owners pay $100,000 fines for ignoring the Do-Not-Call list.
The workers vs owners distinction is the same for fast-food cashiers asking "do you want to Super Size that?", or Radio Shack employee requesting my phone number for their database, or a retail employee trying to sell me an "extended warranty". For each of those situations, I'm annoyed but it's not necessary for me to socially shame the low-level workers with rants about obesity and high-fat consumption, the dangers of privacy invasion and identity theft, and the financial foolishness of 3rd-party warranties. All those employees are just cogs in a wheel and they are required to follow a script and upsell those things. Otherwise, they are fired. I see most telemarketing employees in equivalent situations++. Waging war with those low-level employees seems like fighting the wrong layer. Instead, just don't spend money with the business or utilize technical tricks (e.g. phone TeleZapper).
++To level set, I'm not talking about criminal activities such as scammers making calls to trick senior citizens into wiring their life savings. I'm talking about the single mother or starving college student who sees a job ad for "$8/hour tele-sales" and hopes to get money for diapers or ramen noodles. The telemarketing I was thinking of was newspaper subscriptions, church donations, burglar alarms monitoring, etc.
>For each of those situations, I'm annoyed but it's not necessary for me to socially shame the low-level workers with rants about obesity and high-fat consumption, the dangers of privacy invasion and identity theft, and the financial foolishness of 3rd-party warranties.
And yet, if we did that to such an extent that most people couldn't work those jobs with those policies, would not society be better off as a whole?
>Waging war with those low-level employees seems like fighting the wrong layer.
Speaking of war, the general way it goes is that you shoot the soldiers even though they are just following orders and there are a dozen more to take their place. Ideally taking out the general would be best, but when not given the opportunity to do so you target the highest ranking person in front of you, even if that is the lowly private who is on the same level as you.
> And yet, if we did that to such an extent that most people couldn't work those jobs with those policies, would not society be better off as a whole?
Your attitude isn't just out of touch with reality, it's somewhere between 'callous and unsympathetic' and 'sociopathic.'
Roughly 95% of the people who work in crappy low-wage jobs like fast food or call centers already hate their jobs. They already hate what their employers tell them they have to do. They aren't there because they love cold calling strangers or asking you to upgrade your meal by 1000 calories, they're there because they need a paycheck and have little other alternative.
I can only speak from personal experience regarding call centers, but I imagine fast food isn't very different. Most people absolutely do get out of those jobs as fast as they can. In the call center I worked at, average tenure was 6 months if not less (that's exactly how long I lasted, FWIW). And you know what? Every time a person walks out the door, someone else walks in to take their place, because the world has no shortage of desperate people.
Taking the stance of 'we should torture these people as much as possible because we don't have access to their employers' is bad enough, but to smugly claim that it's really for their own good and the good of society is frankly disturbing.
>Your attitude isn't just out of touch with reality, it's somewhere between 'callous and unsympathetic' and 'sociopathic.'
As is needed of any soldier killing a guy who doesn't want to be there just as much as they don't. Probably the most sociopathic thing I did today was I just ate a Butterfingers candy bar, made by Nestle, and thus likely involved child slavery, which I funded by buying the candy bar. But I do think my informed apathy is a step up from ignorant bliss.
>Roughly 95% of the people who work in crappy low-wage jobs like fast food or call centers already hate their jobs. They already hate what their employers tell them they have to do. They aren't there because they love cold calling strangers or asking you to upgrade your meal by 1000 calories, they're there because they need a paycheck and have little other alternative.
And if their work isn't a net harm for me, I'll try try to make their day more pleasant. But when I'm at the local cell store again because another family member was lied to about their contract, or when you just interrupted my concentration while solving some problem to try to get me to sign up for some service that will be near impossible to cancel and which comes with more fine print than my employment contract, then I am not going to excuse you just because you did such for money.
>Taking the stance of 'we should torture these people as much as possible because we don't have access to their employers' is bad enough, but to smugly claim that it's really for their own good and the good of society is frankly disturbing.
Environmental protection. Benefit should be obvious.
Reducing drunk driving. Ditto.
Insurance (not the kind that would be better off replaced by single payer). Probably the least obvious as it is closest of the three to rent seeking, but the benefit is spreading risk of the incidents insured. Perhaps not as ideal as a fully socialized government system, but this isn't one of the insurance fields that is in direct competition with single payer.
Do you want a list of my non-work related contributions to society as well?
> The workers vs owners distinction is the same for fast-food cashiers asking "do you want to Super Size that?", or Radio Shack employee asking for my phone number, or a retail employee trying to sell me an "extended warranty".
Each of your examples is providing me with a service; making food, ringing up my order, charging my card, or otherwise servicing the store of which I'm a customer. I'm happy to allow them some room for corporate bullshit, because they're also doing something I want them to do.
Listening on lenny bot (A older and more basic bot with plenty of recordings on youtube), I wonder how common it is for those working at telemarketing to start down the slippery slope of scamming.
A question that the game paper please asked, is how plausible it is for a person living near staving condition to give up on their own income on the basis of morals. If at the same time you are working in a environment which directly rewards unmoral behavior with promotions, I wonder if such that behavior doesn't simply become the norm and moral people either quit or do not take up the job in the first place.
So, if a rip-off gang accosts you in the streets some night, and one of the low level flunkies clonks you over the head and takes your money while the gang leader watches, you wouldn't defend yourself? Because it's not his fault?
Consider that he is likely in the gang to protect his little siblings. You don't even want to know what happens to a younger sister when their older brother doesn't join a gang for protection. And if he didn't attack you... well let's just say gangs can be very creative in their methods of punishment. If anything, the low level flunky has far more to lose than just a pay check, so if anything, their behavior would be more justified (if you go with the logic).
I used to work as a telemarketer because there was a recession on and that was the only job I could find after months of looking. I was literally a couple weeks away from being homeless, so I wasn't much inclined to care if I was causing hassle. It's legal, there's a market for it, and I need to eat.
If it makes you feel better about yourself to shit on your economic inferiors, you go right ahead. But if you think you're teaching that telemarketer a lesson or somehow punishing them, you're not. They won't even remember you at the end of the day. You are one of 100+ calls that telemarketer has to make every day. And if you don't say the magic words "please take my name off your list", they will call you again next week. So you're really just wasting your own time.
>It's legal, there's a market for it, and I need to eat.
Releasing steam against the telemarketer is legal, there's a reason for it, and it relieves the immediate tension build up.
>They won't even remember you at the end of the day.
Depends upon spontaneous creativity. I don't have much, so they probably want. But in some ways, even if you don't directly recall the experience, it can still have an impact. If I had not eaten every meal I don't remember anything about, I would be dead right now.
>If it makes you feel better about yourself to shit on your economic inferiors,
You make it sound like it is because they are economically inferiors is the reason people react negatively and in doing so ignore all the actual reasons people don't like telemarketers.
Nearly everything sold by telemarketing is a scam or predatory in some way. If you're already on the do not call list, then every sales call you get that's not from a company you're already doing business with is a scam. I have no issue with wasting as much of their time as possible.
Side note: Thankfully I have my Android phone set to quiet hours until 8am when I was getting up today, otherwise I'd have been awakened by a scam health insurance robo-call before then.
Exactly who are the owners of "Cardholder Services", or "Account Services" or that company that vaguely implies they're from Microsoft Tech Support?
How can I complain? Because I have a load of complaints for each of those companies, and I want to turn them in to the FCC for spoofing their Caller ID, which is illegal.
No? Crickets?
The sole and only weapon we have is to waste the time of the call center people. In at least some of the "Rachel from Cardholder Services" calls, the call center people are in on the scam - they collect credit card number, last 4 of social, CVV and ZIP code of billing address, which is more than enough to use the credit card number without the cardholder's knowledge. In summary, they deserve what they get, and they know it.
So, instead of ignoring the annoying spoofed/hidden caller, I now have to answer (to try and figure out who is calling me), waste time, try calling back to see if they'll remove me from list, and if not submit forms to FCC in the hopes the FCC can/will do anything?
I'm pretty close to the point where I just leave the ringer on my phone off permanently. If somebody calls and I want to speak to them, I'll eventually call back. This sucks because I do speak to my parents on the phone, so we end up playing a lot of phone-tag trying to reach each other.
The FCC could enforce anti-caller ID-spoofing without me, if they wanted to. I believe they have the authority. This is just another way to leave the status quo alone, and put the burden on the victims.
I've reported any number of robocalls-to-do-not-call numbers to the FCC, and exactly nothing has happened. I have no faith that complaining about spoofed caller ID will cause any action at all.
>> How can I complain? Because I have a load of complaints for each of those companies, and I want to turn them in to the FCC for spoofing their Caller ID, which is illegal.
The real question... Why is caller ID spoofing even possible. I assert that it should not be.
> I'd prefer not to waste the time of human employees on the phone because they're just minimum wage workers trying to earn a paycheck. My irritation is with the owners of the telemarketing company.
It is the reason to waste telemarketing company owners money. As a result, telemarketing would become less effective, and employees would lose their job, but it is a good thing.
The goal is not more workplaces. Artificial workplaces are worse than charity or basic income. When people do useless jobs, such as selling tickets, advertising over the phone or on streets etc. they are wasting their time. They can spend it looking for a more interesting job or learning some new skill.
I'm quite happy to waste the time of the guys who I have received calls from recently. They are total assholes and have been harassing people for years if my research into their phone number and company name is anything to go by.
The actual (Indian, but the company is based in London) callers have been known to call and hang up repeatedly, insult or threaten the person being called when they demand to be taken off their contacts list ot demand to know where they got their information from in the first place etc.
> the special 3 beeps intro actually works to fool robo-dialers
I've setup a service so if the number is withheld or international, it plays a recording asking the user to press 1 to speak to a person. It works 95% of the time.
I assume the dialers interpret it as an answer machine so don't connect the call to a real person. A couple of family members have withheld numbers, and they know they just need to press 1 as soon as they here it to reach us.
Almost every single telemarketing call I get these days is coming from not only my own area code but also my own prefix (using random, clearly spoofed numbers). Incredibly annoying, it's at the point where I don't answer the phone for anyone in my own prefix who I don't already have in contacts.
I called the number in the article and experimented with it. It doesn't appear to do anything like the article says, it just says "hello... yes?" over and over again. Maybe I am not using it right.
There's another one based on Asterisk called Lenny - it's an old man who plays the whole "can't hear you" card and it works so well. There's a whole channel of Lenny recordings: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rcinQuDXYn8
Thanks. Thanks a lot. I have this deliverable due out this week and I'm sitting at my workstation, laughing uncontrollably. "I got fired because of Lenny."
There's a couple of comedians who have specialized in baiting telemarketers[1][2]. It's a whole art form, trying to keep the telemarketer engaged while spinning the most ridiculous yarns. The horny priest, the bill collector, the retarded guy, the deaf guy, the guy who couldn't stop burping.
When I was in highschool my family had 3 home phone numbers that were consecutive (8451, 8452, 8453) and once in a while they would all light up from the same telemarketing company. I would conference them all together and listen in as hilarity ensued.
Donation solicitation isn't inherently "better" in my view.
I give to several causes important to me and my family. I also tell them NOT to solicit me more than once during the year. Violators get one additional warning and then I skip a year of donation with a note as to why.
If you want my money, respect my time; it's part of the deal.
I guess living in Canada gives me a different perspective. Generally speaking most telemarketers calling for charity are fairly respectful and are usually contacting you due to a transactional event that's happened fairly recently.
I just got a call from a political party. This same person has called me before, and, I find her detestable so I always pretended to be someone else rather than taking the call. This time I said, "hold on I'll get him on the phone for you." Well, they are still talking, its been about 10 minutes. I kept the phone on speaker for a while -- then I put on 34dB attenuating construction hearing protection and put the phone in another room. I recorded the whole thing in case anyone is curious. Normally when I'm the guy talking I am self-questioning whether I'm being too harsh, or that I'm not being direct enough, or etc... Listening to someone else talk, as if it were me, lets you observe. I heard the telemarketer laughing at the terrible jokes, and, I felt sorry for her. Like she has to laugh at everyone's jokes. I can see now how appeasing the customer (i.e. laughing at terrible jokes) is not the path to a sale. There is something to this "neg" (as popularized by the pickup artists in "the game") both in pursuit of conquests and in pursuit of a sale. The customer needs to want your approval and then you've got the sale. I read the comments on this thread and yeah I can see both sides. It's rather difficult and time consuming to get rid of the telemarketer once he/she has you on the phone, so I will be using this again for sure.
I'm living with my parents for now and got them to cut out their cable television package after introducing them to the Wonderful World of Netflix. But I've found it much, much harder to get them off the home telephone (which here in Canada costs them $40/month!!) and it's 90% telemarketers, usually calling right around dinnertime. I'm planning to note everytime they call and the frequency with which it's a legitimate call on a spreadsheet planned over 30 days but I still haven't gotten around to it. Despite being fairly 'with-it' people (they both have their own smartphones, have a Sonos speaker system and ipads for crying out loud) they refuse to get rid of the home phone. Guess old habits...
I know this is a bit in the weeds, but I recently got an LG V10 on T-Mobile, and there is an option in the Calls menu that allows me to "Reject calls from all private numbers". I can also add numbers to a call reject list, as well. My previous HTC One M8 had the reject by number (but not for private numbers), as well.
My dad has a V10 on Verizon and they don't have the reject private calls option--so it would appear that some carriers are removing functionality that is otherwise available on at least some phones. Figured I'd share because I had before assumed it was a technical problem to block the private numbers, and have been happily surprised now that I don't get calls from "Unknown" anymore.
It's not just old habits -- there is the issue of the quality of the phone call.
It's been my experience that cell phones mostly suck w/r/t phone call quality. Android or Apple, cheap burner flipphones or high-end igadgets... doesn't really seem to matter. From the poor speaker tone (tinny and/or lack of volume), to the digital compression artifacts (yeah yeah, I know it's the fault of the carrier), and the lag time which simulates an intercontinental analog phone call from the 1970s, a home phone is often a superior experience when it comes to simply talking.
It's the reason I keep a phone hanging on the wall.
> The robot does this by cleverly exploiting a flaw in the telemarketer playbook: staying on the line if the person is agreeable. So the system leans on “yeah,” “sure,” “okay” and “yes.”
While this might be a clever single experiment, this is a really bad idea to run a bot like this running on your phone line. Oral contracts over the phone exist so you should avoid any kind of agreement when a telemarketer calls you. (IANAL, I'm not a lawyer, etc...)
It's time someone from a major publishing house wrote a similar article titled "If you hate online ads, tracking and malware, you'll love this new tool designed to waste the publisher's money", and then mention that the tool is called an "ad blocker" and provide links to the good ones. :)
It will lower average day-to-day sales, increase turnover, decrease morale, force the company to eat the costs of on-boarding new employees, and gradually diminish the value of telemarketing as a valid approach to sales. The employees will be better off working somewhere else--fast food, big box store, etc.--and society will derive more value from their career change.
Plus, these recordings like Jolly Roger, Lenny, etc. are a tremendous source of entertainment!
If everybody that just don't like telemarketing (count me in) just politely stop the caller and don't buy the service everything you just said would happen, without burning the poor minimum wage employee that's in the middle of the hate.
It's not a matter of effectiveness, it's a matter of ethics. You don't spam the spammer. You don't fight an evil with evil.
Put yourself in the caller shoes. Would you rather listen a "No thank you" or an automated prank answer?
When we just say no to them we hurt the very foundation of the telemarketing company. When you prank answer them you definitely do it, but you also hurt the guy that's after a (humble) paycheck while doing it.
But I guess the next argument is "they can always just quit" right? Yeah, let's all get together and make a profession miserable because they can always just quit...
>If everybody that just don't like telemarketing (count me in) just politely stop the caller and don't buy the service everything you just said would happen, without burning the poor minimum wage employee that's in the middle of the hate.
Except apparently enough people buy their junk/scams/whatever that it makes it viable to continue to run a telemarketing business. But just because a small percentage of people are into it doesn't mean it's right for them to harass everyone.
So from my perspective, as someone who's not into being telemarketed and who doesn't have the power to make their behavior punishable by law, I may disincentivize their behavior while entertaining myself.
You have a point, but why not disincentive their behavior by just blocking their number? That's way easier than setting up an automated prank answer system.
But I guess that's not as exciting, no "entertainment" there.
I only have a cell phone so I get maybe two telemarketing calls per year since it is illegal in the US to telemarket to cell phones.
Whenever I get one I report it to the FCC, although the numbers are likely spoofed.
I've never been telemarketed by the same organization twice though, so I can idealistically hope that each organization has been shut down.
Edit:
But back on topic, why shouldn't people live their lives in a way that entertains them more? The telemarketers are the ones initiating unwanted contact.
If it becomes economically too ineffective, maybe they'll stop. Lowering the productivity of their employees increases their cost and reduces their revenue.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 203 ms ] threadBut viscerally, I can understand why we do this; my impulse, when on the receiving end of an unsolicited inbound call, would be to do the same.
This definitely works - https://www.donotcall.gov/ not always though
... so... it doesn't work?
"They've done studies you know. 60% of the time, it works every time"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjvQFtlNQ-M
Those who steal are often not in the best of financial straights. Yet we still punish them. Those who commit even worse crimes are often meeting some unmet need or desire, one which may only exist because they are mentally ill, and yet this means we see them as a danger to society. We may pity them, but we will still punish them.
So, shouldn't the same logic apply even when the wrong being committed is much milder? The punishment will be milder (get yelled at, have time wasted) since the wrong is milder, but they still deserve the social repercussion of their actions.
To put it another way, being extreme mean, rude, and condescending to and wasting the time of telemarketers isn't illegal either. Yet some are trying to say doing such is wrong, to which I say that the telemarketers have already committed a greater wrong of the same nature.
The basic idea is that they call you up and offer you something for free or at a steep discount. They explain that they need a small holding fee which will be returned to you, then they run off with your money and you never hear from them again. Free solar panels, vacation cruises, driveway sealing, and discount home repairs/weatherization seem to be the common flavors.
If the following fake recording[1] with the special 3 beeps intro actually works to fool robo-dialers, I'd rather the service do something like that. I also remember seeing a dedicated electronic box[2] that had that recording built-in. You either held it to the mouthpiece of the phone or it was wired in-line between the handset and the base. I'm not sure of the success rate of that device. I wouldn't be surprised if a developer attempted to replicate that device by making an app on iPhone/Android. Again, I'm not sure if pressing a smartphone speaker to the mouthpiece of a handset is good enough audio fidelity to fool robo dialers.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DE4zZwDE7bc
[2] not sure if it was this one: http://www.amazon.com/Privacy-Technologies-TZ-900-TeleZapper...
Sadly, the best way to do this is to make it less profitable for them to employ these business practices. And there are only two ways for you to do that: don't buy their products and force them to spend more money per sale (i.e. waste their time).
Why "sadly"? It is great that we can drive them out of the market just by not paying them, without laws, politics and any kind of coercion.
How is that not an issue for the law?
I'm still perfectly fine wasting their time.
Honestly, I don't get this reasoning that if they are doing it for a small financial gain, they are resolved of any blame for any harm they cause (even if the harm is just annoying me and wasting my time). Yet I see the reasoning being used in multiple instances where they are causing hassle or worse (say when they lie to you about whats in phone contracts, which is my pet peeve).
Yes, I agree that annoyance is being made and hassle is being caused but I assign the "they" part more to the owners of the businesses rather than the low-level employees working the phones. Those workers are just cogs in a wheel. Therefore, I don't derive any satisfaction of justice by making employees suffer the games of an AI Turing Test. On the other hand, I am happy when business owners pay $100,000 fines for ignoring the Do-Not-Call list.
The workers vs owners distinction is the same for fast-food cashiers asking "do you want to Super Size that?", or Radio Shack employee requesting my phone number for their database, or a retail employee trying to sell me an "extended warranty". For each of those situations, I'm annoyed but it's not necessary for me to socially shame the low-level workers with rants about obesity and high-fat consumption, the dangers of privacy invasion and identity theft, and the financial foolishness of 3rd-party warranties. All those employees are just cogs in a wheel and they are required to follow a script and upsell those things. Otherwise, they are fired. I see most telemarketing employees in equivalent situations++. Waging war with those low-level employees seems like fighting the wrong layer. Instead, just don't spend money with the business or utilize technical tricks (e.g. phone TeleZapper).
++To level set, I'm not talking about criminal activities such as scammers making calls to trick senior citizens into wiring their life savings. I'm talking about the single mother or starving college student who sees a job ad for "$8/hour tele-sales" and hopes to get money for diapers or ramen noodles. The telemarketing I was thinking of was newspaper subscriptions, church donations, burglar alarms monitoring, etc.
And yet, if we did that to such an extent that most people couldn't work those jobs with those policies, would not society be better off as a whole?
>Waging war with those low-level employees seems like fighting the wrong layer.
Speaking of war, the general way it goes is that you shoot the soldiers even though they are just following orders and there are a dozen more to take their place. Ideally taking out the general would be best, but when not given the opportunity to do so you target the highest ranking person in front of you, even if that is the lowly private who is on the same level as you.
Your attitude isn't just out of touch with reality, it's somewhere between 'callous and unsympathetic' and 'sociopathic.'
Roughly 95% of the people who work in crappy low-wage jobs like fast food or call centers already hate their jobs. They already hate what their employers tell them they have to do. They aren't there because they love cold calling strangers or asking you to upgrade your meal by 1000 calories, they're there because they need a paycheck and have little other alternative.
I can only speak from personal experience regarding call centers, but I imagine fast food isn't very different. Most people absolutely do get out of those jobs as fast as they can. In the call center I worked at, average tenure was 6 months if not less (that's exactly how long I lasted, FWIW). And you know what? Every time a person walks out the door, someone else walks in to take their place, because the world has no shortage of desperate people.
Taking the stance of 'we should torture these people as much as possible because we don't have access to their employers' is bad enough, but to smugly claim that it's really for their own good and the good of society is frankly disturbing.
As is needed of any soldier killing a guy who doesn't want to be there just as much as they don't. Probably the most sociopathic thing I did today was I just ate a Butterfingers candy bar, made by Nestle, and thus likely involved child slavery, which I funded by buying the candy bar. But I do think my informed apathy is a step up from ignorant bliss.
>Roughly 95% of the people who work in crappy low-wage jobs like fast food or call centers already hate their jobs. They already hate what their employers tell them they have to do. They aren't there because they love cold calling strangers or asking you to upgrade your meal by 1000 calories, they're there because they need a paycheck and have little other alternative.
And if their work isn't a net harm for me, I'll try try to make their day more pleasant. But when I'm at the local cell store again because another family member was lied to about their contract, or when you just interrupted my concentration while solving some problem to try to get me to sign up for some service that will be near impossible to cancel and which comes with more fine print than my employment contract, then I am not going to excuse you just because you did such for money.
>Taking the stance of 'we should torture these people as much as possible because we don't have access to their employers' is bad enough, but to smugly claim that it's really for their own good and the good of society is frankly disturbing.
>torture
I found the bug.
Environmental protection. Benefit should be obvious.
Reducing drunk driving. Ditto.
Insurance (not the kind that would be better off replaced by single payer). Probably the least obvious as it is closest of the three to rent seeking, but the benefit is spreading risk of the incidents insured. Perhaps not as ideal as a fully socialized government system, but this isn't one of the insurance fields that is in direct competition with single payer.
Do you want a list of my non-work related contributions to society as well?
Each of your examples is providing me with a service; making food, ringing up my order, charging my card, or otherwise servicing the store of which I'm a customer. I'm happy to allow them some room for corporate bullshit, because they're also doing something I want them to do.
What does a telemarketer do for me?
How does your analysis translate to soldiers who are ordered to torture prisoners? Or Dickens-style juvenile pickpockets?
A question that the game paper please asked, is how plausible it is for a person living near staving condition to give up on their own income on the basis of morals. If at the same time you are working in a environment which directly rewards unmoral behavior with promotions, I wonder if such that behavior doesn't simply become the norm and moral people either quit or do not take up the job in the first place.
If it makes you feel better about yourself to shit on your economic inferiors, you go right ahead. But if you think you're teaching that telemarketer a lesson or somehow punishing them, you're not. They won't even remember you at the end of the day. You are one of 100+ calls that telemarketer has to make every day. And if you don't say the magic words "please take my name off your list", they will call you again next week. So you're really just wasting your own time.
Releasing steam against the telemarketer is legal, there's a reason for it, and it relieves the immediate tension build up.
>They won't even remember you at the end of the day.
Depends upon spontaneous creativity. I don't have much, so they probably want. But in some ways, even if you don't directly recall the experience, it can still have an impact. If I had not eaten every meal I don't remember anything about, I would be dead right now.
>If it makes you feel better about yourself to shit on your economic inferiors,
You make it sound like it is because they are economically inferiors is the reason people react negatively and in doing so ignore all the actual reasons people don't like telemarketers.
>So you're really just wasting your own time.
The telemarketer already did that for me.
Side note: Thankfully I have my Android phone set to quiet hours until 8am when I was getting up today, otherwise I'd have been awakened by a scam health insurance robo-call before then.
How can I complain? Because I have a load of complaints for each of those companies, and I want to turn them in to the FCC for spoofing their Caller ID, which is illegal.
No? Crickets?
The sole and only weapon we have is to waste the time of the call center people. In at least some of the "Rachel from Cardholder Services" calls, the call center people are in on the scam - they collect credit card number, last 4 of social, CVV and ZIP code of billing address, which is more than enough to use the credit card number without the cardholder's knowledge. In summary, they deserve what they get, and they know it.
I'm pretty close to the point where I just leave the ringer on my phone off permanently. If somebody calls and I want to speak to them, I'll eventually call back. This sucks because I do speak to my parents on the phone, so we end up playing a lot of phone-tag trying to reach each other.
I've reported any number of robocalls-to-do-not-call numbers to the FCC, and exactly nothing has happened. I have no faith that complaining about spoofed caller ID will cause any action at all.
The real question... Why is caller ID spoofing even possible. I assert that it should not be.
Same story with abusing SSNs as an authentication mechanism.
It is the reason to waste telemarketing company owners money. As a result, telemarketing would become less effective, and employees would lose their job, but it is a good thing.
The goal is not more workplaces. Artificial workplaces are worse than charity or basic income. When people do useless jobs, such as selling tickets, advertising over the phone or on streets etc. they are wasting their time. They can spend it looking for a more interesting job or learning some new skill.
The actual (Indian, but the company is based in London) callers have been known to call and hang up repeatedly, insult or threaten the person being called when they demand to be taken off their contacts list ot demand to know where they got their information from in the first place etc.
I've setup a service so if the number is withheld or international, it plays a recording asking the user to press 1 to speak to a person. It works 95% of the time.
I assume the dialers interpret it as an answer machine so don't connect the call to a real person. A couple of family members have withheld numbers, and they know they just need to press 1 as soon as they here it to reach us.
There's a couple of comedians who have specialized in baiting telemarketers[1][2]. It's a whole art form, trying to keep the telemarketer engaged while spinning the most ridiculous yarns. The horny priest, the bill collector, the retarded guy, the deaf guy, the guy who couldn't stop burping.
1. https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=jim+florentine+...
2. https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=tom+mabe+telema...
I give to several causes important to me and my family. I also tell them NOT to solicit me more than once during the year. Violators get one additional warning and then I skip a year of donation with a note as to why.
If you want my money, respect my time; it's part of the deal.
I'm in the US. We have a do-not-call registry. Spammers don't seem to care and hide their numbers, so I can't report them.
My dad has a V10 on Verizon and they don't have the reject private calls option--so it would appear that some carriers are removing functionality that is otherwise available on at least some phones. Figured I'd share because I had before assumed it was a technical problem to block the private numbers, and have been happily surprised now that I don't get calls from "Unknown" anymore.
Frankly, I wish "private" numbers were banned outright. I can't think of a good reason for allowing them.
It's the reason I keep a phone hanging on the wall.
While this might be a clever single experiment, this is a really bad idea to run a bot like this running on your phone line. Oral contracts over the phone exist so you should avoid any kind of agreement when a telemarketer calls you. (IANAL, I'm not a lawyer, etc...)
Does the phone-owner have a responsibility for any contract made over that phone?...
I fail to see how "fighting" telemarketers will improve anything.
Plus, these recordings like Jolly Roger, Lenny, etc. are a tremendous source of entertainment!
It's not a matter of effectiveness, it's a matter of ethics. You don't spam the spammer. You don't fight an evil with evil.
Sounds like the kindergarten definition of "fair" to me.
When we just say no to them we hurt the very foundation of the telemarketing company. When you prank answer them you definitely do it, but you also hurt the guy that's after a (humble) paycheck while doing it.
But I guess the next argument is "they can always just quit" right? Yeah, let's all get together and make a profession miserable because they can always just quit...
Except apparently enough people buy their junk/scams/whatever that it makes it viable to continue to run a telemarketing business. But just because a small percentage of people are into it doesn't mean it's right for them to harass everyone.
So from my perspective, as someone who's not into being telemarketed and who doesn't have the power to make their behavior punishable by law, I may disincentivize their behavior while entertaining myself.
But I guess that's not as exciting, no "entertainment" there.
Whenever I get one I report it to the FCC, although the numbers are likely spoofed.
I've never been telemarketed by the same organization twice though, so I can idealistically hope that each organization has been shut down.
Edit: But back on topic, why shouldn't people live their lives in a way that entertains them more? The telemarketers are the ones initiating unwanted contact.