Telemarketer: "I'm not trying to sell you anything"

Today, I kept a telemarketer talking on the phone for a full 9 minutes!

He insisted that he was going to send me a free cameraphone with some credit already on it, and that he wasn't trying to sell me anything. He told me that the call costs were 1/6th the costs that they normally would be, but when I asked him to admit that he was trying to sell me telephone calls, he denied it.

This went on for 9 minutes. At about the 7 minute mark, I heard a series of beeps on the line. Must've been the signal to him to wrap up the call, but he persisted.

I should have kept an eye on the timer and made sure he ran 3 or 4 minutes over time. If two people per telemarketer per hour kept the conversation going for 10 minutes without a sale at the end of it, we would see a 1/3 reduction in telemarketing calls.

Let's say a nice chap called Rajah works for a call centre. In the hour between 12pm and 1pm Western Daylight Saving Time, he calls someone who immediately hangs up. He rings another person, who immediately hangs up. He rings someone else who keeps him talking for 10 minutes. He calls an old lady, who is so lonely she will talk to him for 15 minutes and then buy whatever he's selling. His next call gets an immediate hangup. The call after that has him talking for 10 minutes without a sale.

Out of the whole hour, assuming only two of his callees keep him talking, he's wasted 25 minutes. Lonely old ladies like to keep talking, even when they know you don't give a shit about whatever story they're yammering on about (sorry, I'm in a bit of an rude mood tonight!). So that's where I got the extra 5 minutes from.

Multiply that by 8 hours, and multiply that by however many telemarketers there are. That's an immensely huge blow to the companies that employ telemarketers. Another trick: Always ask to speak to their supervisor. Be polite about this, but firm. You must always get your way. When you get put through to the supervisor, be as absolutely rude and difficult as possible. If more people did that, they'd need to hire more supervisors, and more supervisors means less of a return on their telemarketing.

We must waste as much telemarketer time as possible. In an ideal world, nobody would buy from telemarketers or even give the impression that they are interested in anything. But all the while we still just say "Not interested thanks", we're letting the telemarketers call more people each hour. Wasting their time means they call fewer people per hour, which means lower sales for them.

I also like sending back SAEs that have been sent as part of junk mail. Preferably with as much crap as I can put in them. They not only pay for the mailout, but also the mailback, and they get no sale from it. I've just thought of a better idea - fill in the form, ask for a huge amount of the product, and put a fake credit card number on it. They will spend time entering in all the information, but not get a sale out of it because the card number is not valid.

Telemarketers and bulk junk mailers are the enemy, and we must make the enemy's war machine much less efficient.