Not In Service!

By the grace of god and the wisdom of Alexander Graham Bell,,,,,,,-s.p.g.i.



The telephone heralded a miraculous new era of information-sharing for the human race. When it made its debut in 1876, the very name of the device combined the ancient greek words for "far" and "voice" (tele/phone) and there is no doubt that it was a massive leap forward for mankind, enabling us to share crucial information with each other over vast distances.



Sadly, however the telephone has fallen from its noble post of glory within human homes. In our times only advertisements ,,,and bill-collectors (from that time you gave in to the advertisements,,) bother to communicate with the owners of traditional phones.

We live in an era that deifies loss and disenchantment, and that's the phone in a nutshell, baby. I would know! I happen to be one of the fringe lunatics who scrounge about the desolate ruins of telephone country, furtively ekeing out a living from the nightmarish terrain. I hunt the ever-more elusive lead, tracking its progress through the weeks, pursuing it with packs of eager callbacks, finally snaring it by throwing a neighborhood discount over it to net me a skittish and wily opportunity before wading in to finish it with my trusty free estimate. What can I say,, I'm a hopeless romantic inside. Anybody could have been a mighty hunter of leads in the honeymoon years of telemarketing, but it takes a bold, grittily determined, stubborn, and resigned sort of martyr/sadist to make a living in the phone industry today.

The fact that telemarketing hasn't flourished was always a little puzzling to me. I mean, take a quick look over the major facts of our country today: A) We're lazy and like things to come to us, without us having to even put on pants for the occasion. B) We're deeply, spiritually and sexually connected to our credit cards, which can be used to make stuff come to you that you're just too damn lazy to get, but also too damned bored to not desire new stuff frantically since it busts up the monotony and gives a sense of false accomplishment. It really could have been just the most utopian arrangement we'd sunk down to as a nation yet! Alas, I am inclined to thrust the blame for the lingering demise of phone sales firmly into the hands of all the soulless bloody con-jobs who didn't even have the brass to look their marks in the eyes while they robbed them. The same con-jobs who swindled older folks, and squeezed people's sympathies for disaster victims, just to make themselves a buck. F&*kers. The sad thing is this: If we'd managed to NOT try to prey on each other in this way, each of those thieves might have been able to make a comfortable living in a legitimate job. I suspect that purchasing all kinds of things safely AND lazily from home would have positively impacted our economy, too. Stupider people would have had their own way to lazy-shop it up like those damned internet nerds, but without having to even pretend to learn anything new. Taken the wind out of the dot.com sales a bit, cushion the catastrophic failure a little. But,,,,HA! And the opposite of that happened, as that damned Murphy probably knew it would: Now, honest people working honest jobs can't get anyone to pay attention, even when the product is top-notch and the price is bargain-basement. That's right, both the customer and the telemarketer were shafted, thanks to some of the worlds most awful people.
Of course, there are those who maintain that even non-criminal, legitimate telemarketers are also awful people, claiming that it's rude and intrusive to phone up and offer them terrific values. I might kind of see where folks would have a right to be mighty pissed about the hours the calls come in, but I cannot help but think that if you're getting all uptight, juvenile and hostile merely because you had to travel ALL THE WAY TO YOUR PHONE from anywhere inside your house before being made to endure the crushing confusion and agonizing dissapointment of it being someone you didn't know followed by heinous threats of quality services and fair prices, then face it: you would find something else to turn into a damn slavering rabid beast about anyway, even if all telemarketing offices vanished overnight. Just a hint: When someone gets huffy about something as transient and also controllable as a phone call, it's a signal to others that the huffy, yowling someone is unsure of themselves, and is desperate to drive away any unfamiliars that can't hurt them in order to feel like victors at something- even if all they got to do was "rightgeously" vanquish the voice trying to pass through their home for a few moments.

And that's another thing. What is with all the half-assed excuses coming out of people that I call? It's much better to simply listen for a few moments, consider whether or not this could be something that you would benefit from, and then reply in an unhurried, confident manner. It's embarrassing that people I've in likelihood never even met are made hurried and uncomfortable just from a voice encounter! I have no desire to alter anyone's reactions, generally. There are people that rush up one sentence all into a squash of higher pitching voice, at the end of a barely intelligible sentence, then squawk or squeak or making some other similar sound of displeasure AND startlement. That drives me crazy. And the other things that people come up with, do they HONESTLY think that we buy it just because we hang up? Gods, if you're so unhinged by the call that your best excuse was, "We're just going out the fridge, er, door!." "Oh, yeah, im not that person, i'm just the - lame excuse here- Or, "I can't hear you!" - Or, "I'm just doing some "great big unpleasant chore". than we just let you go! Seriously? If you were really scrubbing the scum off your bathroom tiles or were industriously in the midst of building an arc with a divine mandate and a zoo permit, WHY WOULD YOU PICK UP THE PHONE?--- You wouldn't. So, because you didn't look at the caller id before you assumed you knew who was calling, you're been confronted with a stranger!!! "Oh my god,,, a voice I"VE NOT HEARD BEFORE!!! what do I do?! What do I Do?! etc. " Ahh, excuse me just a moment, good people everywhere, and especially nervous, easily flustered sorts of good people everywhere- CHILL OUT, and LISTEN. Just LISTEN. If the person is just painfully clumsy in their attempts at communication, you could suggest that perhaps they memorize more of the details of the product, before asking to speak to someone else if you have interest in the product, or excusing yourself with a polite goodbye if not! And you know what, we really don't expect the customers to suffer for very long; if you're really never going to benefit from whatever is being offered, don't kill yourself by listening to a person trying to fit information into what they're thinking is the right place because you're still silent! Callers are all stuck doing their work in the dark, so to speak, since we have only two or three pieces of information about people whom we're trying to reach, and as the customer, you need to be if not impressed, at least not disgusted by how these informational pieces are offered in the very beginning of the call. You don't really need to know or care about our names, but we've only ever had yours in print and we're all from different parts of places that say things certain ways, but gods forbid a telemarketer mispronounce your name, having never met you, and being contracted to provide information to you. They're just doing their job, which is to let you know about whatever it is. Please, trade some respect for the respect that they're showing you by being informed, polite, and helpful and just listen through to smooth stopping point before interjecting your confirmed loss of interest. To lose interest for a valid reason is just the nature of these interactions. Whatever, hey. And being nice doesn't mean you have to be a soft target, either. The firmest declines have been from the most confident and polite customers, who explained firmly about whatever, but were respectful and I took them at their word and withdrew politely from their phone line. Rude persons are often shrill, and come off as charicatures of people, flat, and unimportant, a brief loud, and otherwise un-noteworthy thing that happens and is dismissed as meaningless, after a brief piteous indignation. Occasionally, you get a sadistic master of the telemarketer-baiting art, and they will play us by the headsets for as much as a half-hour like trout, before cutting the line and dropping us cold. There is a certain amount of grudging respect for skilled anglers, as such, in the phone room. It might be because all of us know how much research whatever chore of a person must have done to know how to be just such a pain in the ass.