Maybe my wife knows me too well, or maybe she misreads my actions. I am accused frequently of being unsociable but I prefer to consider myself intolerant to small talk and incongruity. Yes, I do feel awkward when nothing worth saying comes to mind. How I envy my son who as a child goes up to another child and says ‘I’m Tim, who are you? What shall we do now?’; so uninhibited but a genuine willingness on both parties to share some time together.
I am an introvert by nature but always happy to chat with another person if the subject matter is interesting and worthy of debate. Put me with people who have something interesting to say and I’ll join in with enthusiasm.
However, there is a big difference between a person with something interesting to say and a person who thinks you should be interested in what they have to say. And in the hierarchy of interesting topics, I would rather debate the corruption of bible translations with Jehovah’s Witnesses than be bothered at all by the parasitical thief of time known as telephone sales.
I know what you’re going to say, these guys are just doing a job and it is nothing personal. That may be true but what they say is also scripted, mind numbingly soul destroying and could only possibly be accomplished happily by the very people I would never strike up a decent conversation with: no small talk, no gossip, no soap operas, no scripted reality TV, no reality TV, no magazines, no supercilious drivel. I have no idea what they are selling and I don't want to know; I do not want to buy it. If I needed it I would buy it. If I don’t need it, there will be a sales person trying to convince me that I do.
The demarcation line is easy to see; if they have to sell it to you then you don’t need it. Not only that but if you do buy that insurance against being sold dodgy insurance, that will never pay out because you would have to pay in for 30 years before the insurance becomes valid (but you do get a really nice cheap pen that you pay for out of your first month’s premium), it will be you that pays commission to the person who phoned you up in the middle of dinner when it was most inconvenient. In short, they want you to pay them money for phoning you up and selling you an expensive white elephant.
At a time when the world is in debt and people with maxed out credit cards are trying to cut out the expenses in their life, you get more and more nuisance phone calls where reluctant employees are trying to sell you nothing for as big a profit as possible.
And it all starts when you pick up the phone and that voice says, “Hello Mr Ward. My name is Bob. How are you today?”
Of course I don’t mean to be rude but it is at that point that I hang up. Bob has already committed a cardinal sin. He does not know me and the probability is that he has absolutely no concern for my health and well being. He does not want to know how I am; he wants to draw up a verbal contract that means I want to do business with him. I don’t. How can anyone conduct business with a modicum of faith if the person begins the contract with such a disingenuous question? It is scripted of course by those who spend their business life making money out of the gullible and those not accustomed to critical thinking. Don't get me wrong; we've all been there at some time in our lives, sucked into the moment and then wishing afterwards that we had never even answered the phone.
I could reply, “I was doing really great until you phoned up” but that is still dialogue and encourages rapport. I rather like John Locke’s idea (8 Out of Ten Cats Does Countdown) of asking the guy to hang on while he gets some documentation and just leaves the phone off the hook while he goes and finishes dinner.
If I were given the choice between having to bat away telesales calls three times a week or swapping my shower scrunchy for a tic-infested hedgehog with flatulent tendencies, I reckon the hedgehog might just edge it if it were not for the case that no matter how many preference call systems you sign up to there are just as many sales companies that do not subscribe to it.
The wider connotations of telesales is always going to be tied to predatory practices to sell successfully things that people would seldom buy, mostly because the cost is beyond their ability to pay for it. Marketing would argue that if they did not call then you might miss out on an opportunity. But what we don’t know about we don’t miss right? I really don’t need hundreds of desk chained, commission based, poor students telling me what I might miss or rent desperate, soul defeated automatons who hate their job, alerting me to buy something that in another fantasy world I might actually entertain purchasing the equivalent of an arctic-safe ice machine that runs on polar bear droppings.
A solution comes to mind that I might even try one day. Perhaps I should declare from the beginning of the conversation that I charge £1000 an hour for my time and an initial call charge is £100 (payable in advance), so if the caller would like to pay it and give me company details and a billing address for the remaining time, they can talk to me about anything they want. Then when they ask ‘How are you today?’ my response will be at their expense and not mine.
