Telesales Ju-Jitsu

Telemarketers - don’t you just hate them?

Well, up to a point.  When I’m at work, I’m fairly cool about someone who rings up and tries to sell me something.  This may be because it doesn’t happen all that much in my present job and it provides a welcome relief from the slog of administering databases, and maybe because business to business sales are better targeted and have at least some chance of interesting me.

At home though, I’m registered with the Telephone Preference Service which pretty much eliminates calls from reputable companies.  That means that anyone who still tries is not a reputable company.  If they ring up, they want to sell you something dodgy.  So they are fair game for a bout of telesales ju-jitsu.  String them along, and revel in the pleasure of stringing them along.  See how outlandish you can be.

Gavin rang me up all the way from India to tell me about the terrible virus problems I was having on my computer.  Obviously hoping that I didn’t know a computer from a pile of rocks.  I think he wanted me to type in a website URL which of course would pretend to scan my system and Shock Horror!  find a virus.  Not sure if he wanted to sell me an anti virus system, or if he would just run the "scanner" again and miraculously have it clear the problem. Or it may be worse than that and they empty your bank account - never got that far - scam update here.  

Anyway, I was all ears, asked Gavin to help me.  He asked me to type in the URL and I asked him what that was.  So we discussed the Start button and of course I don’t have one on the screen.  After about ten minutes of him getting increasingly frantic as none of the things he tried to get me to do worked, he asked me how I logged on to the internet.  I told him I didn’t have internet access on my PC.  Ha ha!

I told an energy salesman who wanted me to switch to his supplier that I had an experimental cold fusion reactor in my basement which generated all the power I needed, and asked him if his company would be interested in buying my surplus energy.  Still waiting to hear back.

And I told a shares scammer that I was part of an anarcho-syndicalist commune that believed in holding all property in common, and that capitalism was a jackboot on the neck of the people, and share ownership is a weapon used against the working class, etc, etc, until he gave up.

I look forward to telesales calls now...