NEWS: Telemarketing Defense Tools

CULTURE: Telemarketing Defense Tools

As telemarketing rises during the holiday season, take refuge in a number of services designed to limit the flood of corporate cold callers interrupting your daily lives.



First, www.junkbusters.com is a site designed as an online tool kit to help you reduce or eliminate telemarketing, spam, junk mail, web ads, and junk faxes. They give helpful suggestions to remove yourself from offending companies' call lists and also provide links to a national do-not-call registry.



A little more fun is www.sorrygottago.com, which hosts a database of pre-recorded audio clips so you can be prepared when your dinner is interrupted. Its current collection intended to confuse and frustrate callers includes cows mooing, lots of recorded sneezes, and even a male voice repeating "I'm listening" with random "Oh I'm here, I'm here," thrown in until the telemarketeter gives up.



Here is one popular clip:

If you are the creative type, and would like to design your own defense, take inspiration from Tom Mabe, a comedian recognized for involved scenarios he concocts to punish telemarketers. In one of his most famous, Mabe frightens a caller by suggesting the employee has phoned a murder scene, Mabe is a detective, and the caller is now a suspect.



You can listen to the whole sketch here. Mabe does a convincing and hilarious job, terrifying the telemarketer.

oh thats good

While I agree that junk calls are irritating as hell I feel sorry for the people doing shitty jobs on shitty wages in a shitty work place having people insult and abuse them. The real targets should be the fuckwits who run telemarketing firms.

People in the UK can sign up for the "Telephone Preferance Service". Any company calling a person registered with TPS is breakinbg the law. It works, less sucessfully, with mobiles too, managing to stop most junk SMS. We also have an Mail Preference Service.


Mail Preference Service
Telephone Preference Service

We also have regulation to prevent "silent calls" generated by automatic calling equipment.

Exactly.

About 40% or something of all graduates in the UK work at shitty telemarketing gigs because they don't demand experience and know they can work them until they drop. The public seethes, bitches and moans but don't remember that loads of those guys are just trying to earn a wage in a job they are often painfully overqualified to do. Of course it sucks getting junk calls, nobody likes getting them. Just a shame that the general public forget the people on the other end aren't deliberately trying to louse up their lives.

Canadians can use the Canadian Marketing Association's Do Not Contact Service, which has a quick and painless registration online.

While I do sympathize with my brethren in the arts that have had to do this kind of work, I refuse to tolerate their call based on that. Those jobs exist because telemarketers feel that the time/money/success quotient is viable. Tying up their phone lines, and slowing down their system is one of the few things that could make this disgusting work less profitable, and force them to move on to something else.