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	taviblue 2007-01-20 12:12 am UTC (link)
	Y'know, the last time I checked, if it's a telemarketer, all you have to do is say no, three times, and they will say "I'm sorry, let me put you on the no-call list." That's all I've ever had to do. Of coourse, the time when I faked that my brother and sister died in a car wreck was just for fun... (Reply to this)(Thread)

	princessdot 2007-01-20 12:29 am UTC (link)
	"Oh, you're looking for Ms. Dot? ~sad emo voice~ ~choked sobs~ she's......dead!" (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

ealusaid
2007-01-20 02:40 am UTC (link)

For some reason my area is rife with call centres, so a lot of my friends are telemarketers. One of them called for a person and the woman on the other end started crying; a new voice came on and said, "That's my father; he died a month ago and my mother was just getting over it, you bitch." The next person she called for? She interrupted their wake.

At which point her supervisor said, "Well, um, you can go home for the rest of the day."

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	ayezur 2007-01-20 03:37 am UTC (link)
	....I laughed. Does that make me horrible? (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	ealusaid 2007-01-20 04:02 am UTC (link)
	Yes. I'm sorry to tell you. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

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ayezur, 2007-01-20 04:05 am UTC

	stella_polaris 2007-01-20 02:08 pm UTC (link)
	Yeah. That never happened to me, but the girl next to me called for someone who was dead and their husband answered D: Not nice. (Reply to this)(Parent)

	feloniousfeline 2007-01-20 04:54 am UTC (link)
	My mother did something like that once. The telemarketer called and asked for her and my mother said she wasn't available, she was at her husband's funeral. And my dad once told a telemarketer calling for me that I was in Venezuela, possibly being held on drug charges. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

priestesspadfoo
2007-01-20 10:57 am UTC (link)

Before we were on the no-call list, telemarketers would call and ask for the man's ex-wife, so I started saying things like, "Sorry, she's chained in the basement."

Once I told a guy, "No, she was a cheating bitch, so he had to kill her," and he started laughing so hard he couldn't say anything else. :D I think there must have been some personal history there, cos even I didn't think it was that funny.

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	taviblue 2007-01-20 07:22 am UTC (link)
	Yeah, pretty much. The poor woman on the other end sounded like I'd run over her puppy or something. Afterwards, my siblings and I laughed our asses off. XD (Reply to this)(Parent)

moonjaguar
2007-01-20 12:37 am UTC (link)

That never worked-- I still occasionally find voicemail messages asking if I want to subscribe to a newspaper that doesn't have home delivery in my town. I thought they'd've gotten the news about that by now but my guess is telemarketers selling newspaper subs likely aren't from the area the paper originates. Friend of mine did telemarketing for a year (whoa!) and she mentioned how many subs to Philly Inquirers and other 1000+-miles-away papers she sold or didn't sell.

I pretended I was a burglar once and the agent played along.

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	hristaesir 2007-01-20 05:48 am UTC (link)
	Qwest keeps sending me junkmail asking me to get DSL from them. Never mind that I TRIED to get DSL from them and they don't have service where I live. Now even if they did manage to get DSL in my neighborhood I wouldn't get it just because I'm so pissed that they left me stuck with Comcast. (Reply to this)(Parent)

	ladysorka 2007-01-20 03:06 am UTC (link)
	When I, er, worked as a telemarketer (inhouse, calling people who were already customers), they only way we were allowed to put them on the no-call list was if they specifically said "Please put me on your no call/do not call list". Even if they said "No. No. No. Don't call my anymore, ever.", we'd get fired if we put them on the list. Damn I hated that job. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	taviblue 2007-01-20 07:20 am UTC (link)
	Apparently Texas has weird telemarketing rules or something, then. It might just be the threat of finding out the person you called has a gun and lives less than 3 hours away. But that is a story for another time... Unless you ask for it. XD (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	felinephoenix 2007-01-21 08:44 pm UTC (link)
	Ooooh, tell, tell! ~~Whoo, someone else from Texas!~~ (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

taviblue
2007-01-22 05:23 am UTC (link)

It's actually a friend's story. He worked at a place that rhymes with pest, and was doing outbound for something or another. The guy he got started yelling as soon as he picked up the phone, cursing, screaming... Friend was calm and collected. Then the guy started threatening his family. I was told it was something along the lines of "come to your house, kill you, kill you male relatives, rape your female relative, and stab your dog."

Said friend is rather family-oriented. Threats did not go over well at all.

He very calmly, collectedly confirmed the guy's information, which placed him about 3 hours' drive away. He then requested his lunch break. Supervisor, having overheard the call, agrees.

Friend drove out to the guy's house, knocked on his door, and when it was answered, asked "Are you Mr. Sonso?" Guy says yes, he is. Friend proceeds to use a shotgun on guy's car, and leaves after telling him "If you ever threaten my family again, that will be you."

He drives back to work, clocks back in, and proceeds to finish his day.

The guy didn't get the balls together to report him until the next day. XD

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v_digitalwytch, 2007-01-22 07:26 pm UTC

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aerobot, 2007-01-23 01:01 pm UTC

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taviblue, 2007-01-24 04:06 am UTC

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aerobot, 2007-01-25 01:35 pm UTC

	brown_betty 2007-01-20 08:18 am UTC (link)
	When I worked as a phone surveyor (like a telemarketer, but you pretend you're not selling your soul) people would say, "take me off your list!" and then hang up, and they'd just get stuck back in the queue since technically there was no list to take them off of, and they needed to be instead placed on a list. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	chibikaijuu 2007-01-20 08:11 pm UTC (link)
	I like phone surveys! They're always at least a little entertaining. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	brown_betty 2007-01-20 08:13 pm UTC (link)
	Man, I worked there three months and I swear it gave me a personality disorder. (Reply to this)(Parent)

	v_digitalwytch 2007-01-22 07:28 pm UTC (link)
	If I've got nothing better to do, I will do the survey on those. Though with the one Christian one on objectionable film content, I probably sent the girl needing a phone break after she was done with me. I think I broke her brain with the parental responsibility argument. (Reply to this)(Parent)

stella_polaris
2007-01-20 02:12 pm UTC (link)

We couldn't do put them on the no-call list. As in literally could not. We didn't have the software to that. We didn't even call our customers manually, we had a machine who called them for as. Some people got so pissy when I told them that they had to call our customer service to get on the list or... oh no, visit a web site! Seriously, I get that it's annoying, but some people just got really angry and said it was too much of a bother. And yet they throw a hissyfit for spending two minutes on the phone. Contradictions, ah.

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(Anonymous)
2007-01-20 04:22 pm UTC (link)

Some people got so pissy when I told them that they had to call our customer service to get on the list or... oh no, visit a web site!

I'm possibly stepping into a minefield here, but . . . why is it snarkworthy that people get pissed at having to go out of their way to keep a company from cold-calling them? If they weren't already customers, then it's just assy that the company didn't have a more straightforward way of opting out of getting telemarketing calls.

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	stella_polaris 2007-01-20 05:08 pm UTC (link)
	I should expressed myself better, it's more about how they acted like it was my fault. I always tried to sound as apologetic as possible, but I got called a lier and whatnot. Also, I should've probably mentioned that we only called people who already were our customers. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

(no subject) - (Anonymous), 2007-01-20 05:42 pm UTC

	(Anonymous) 2007-01-21 04:31 am UTC (link)
	That was not a legal thing your company was doing. At least not in the US. The law requires that DNC requests be honored in a timely fashion and that one request is enough. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

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stella_polaris, 2007-01-21 04:11 pm UTC

	lillyv 2007-01-20 10:44 pm UTC (link)
	Same here. I worked for a non-profit, though, so the National DNC list didn't apply. I hated having to explain that to people. (Reply to this)(Parent)

(Anonymous)
2007-01-29 04:23 am UTC (link)

A friend of mine in high school freaked out when a telemarketer asked her if she was interested in their product (she had just told them that there was no one by her (mis-pronounced) father's name at that number), and for some reason, her first impulse was to tell them that she had just been through, and I quote, "a harrowing sex change operation" and so she didn't have much money.
/obligatory telemarketer anecdote

ainself

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