6 ms·

I'd prefer not to waste the time of human employees on the phone because they're just minimum wage workers trying to earn a paycheck. My irritation is with the

by jasode 11y ago

I'd prefer not to waste the time of human employees on the phone because they're just minimum wage workers trying to earn a paycheck. My irritation is with the owners of the telemarketing company. If the following fake recording[1] with the special 3 beeps intro actually works to fool robo-dialers, I'd rather the service do something like that. I also remember seeing a dedicated electronic box[2] that had that recording built-in. You either held it to the mouthpiece of the phone or it was wired in-line between the handset and the base. I'm not sure of the success rate of that device. I wouldn't be surprised if a developer attempted to replicate that device by making an app on iPhone/Android. Again, I'm not sure if pressing a smartphone speaker to the mouthpiece of a handset is good enough audio fidelity to fool robo dialers. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DE4zZwDE7bc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DE4zZwDE7bc [2] not sure if it was this one: http://www.amazon.com/Privacy-Technologies-TZ-900-TeleZapper-900/dp/B00006881R http://www.amazon.com/Privacy-Technologies-TZ-900-TeleZapper...

davorb 11y ago
> My irritation is with the owners of the telemarketing company. Sadly, the best way to do this is to make it less profitable for them to employ these business practices. And there are only two ways for you to do that: don't buy their products and force them to spend more money per sale (i.e. waste their time).
- ycmbntrthrwaway 11y ago
  > Sadly Why "sadly"? It is great that we can drive them out of the market just by not paying them, without laws, politics and any kind of coercion.
  - MiddleEndian 11y ago
    They can harass you at will, just because a small percentage of the people they harass are into it. How is that not an issue for the law?
coldpie 11y ago
Nah, fuck 'em. If you have no respect for me or my time, I have no respect for yours.
ryanhuff 11y ago
The employees are there to make calls. I don't see having to deal with a robot as wasting their time, since they are hopefully being paid regardless. Now, if they are being paid on commission, then they are part of the problem, and removing the incentive will help correct the annoyance.
- acveilleux 11y ago
  Most call center employee's continuing employment is predicated on making sales, if they don't meet a quota they get fired.
  - ant6n 11y ago
    ...thus removing the incentive and help correcting the annoyance.
  - coldpie 11y ago
    I feel like we might be in a better situation if we had a strong social safety net for the unemployed instead of annoying me and scamming old people to support the otherwise-unemployed. (Don't forget to vote, folks.)
Lawtonfogle 11y ago
>I'd prefer not to waste the time of human employees on the phone because they're just minimum wage workers trying to earn a paycheck. I'm still perfectly fine wasting their time. Honestly, I don't get this reasoning that if they are doing it for a small financial gain, they are resolved of any blame for any harm they cause (even if the harm is just annoying me and wasting my time). Yet I see the reasoning being used in multiple instances where they are causing hassle or worse (say when they lie to you about whats in phone contracts, which is my pet peeve).
- jasode 11y ago
  >I don't get this reasoning that ... they are resolved of any blame ... annoying me ... causing hassle Yes, I agree that annoyance is being made and hassle is being caused but I assign the "they" part more to the owners of the businesses rather than the low-level employees working the phones. Those workers are just cogs in a wheel. Therefore, I don't derive any satisfaction of justice by making employees suffer the games of an AI Turing Test. On the other hand, I am happy when business owners pay $100,000 fines for ignoring the Do-Not-Call list. The workers vs owners distinction is the same for fast-food cashiers asking "do you want to Super Size that?", or Radio Shack employee requesting my phone number for their database, or a retail employee trying to sell me an "extended warranty". For each of those situations, I'm annoyed but it's not necessary for me to socially shame the low-level workers with rants about obesity and high-fat consumption, the dangers of privacy invasion and identity theft, and the financial foolishness of 3rd-party warranties. All those employees are just cogs in a wheel and they are required to follow a script and upsell those things. Otherwise, they are fired. I see most telemarketing employees in equivalent situations++. Waging war with those low-level employees seems like fighting the wrong layer. Instead, just don't spend money with the business or utilize technical tricks (e.g. phone TeleZapper). ++To level set, I'm not talking about criminal activities such as scammers making calls to trick senior citizens into wiring their life savings. I'm talking about the single mother or starving college student who sees a job ad for "$8/hour tele-sales" and hopes to get money for diapers or ramen noodles. The telemarketing I was thinking of was newspaper subscriptions, church donations, burglar alarms monitoring, etc.
  - 11y ago
ricardobeat 11y ago
If the end goal is to defeat telemarketing, they will end up jobless regardless.
JohnTHaller 11y ago
Nearly everything sold by telemarketing is a scam or predatory in some way. If you're already on the do not call list, then every sales call you get that's not from a company you're already doing business with is a scam. I have no issue with wasting as much of their time as possible. Side note: Thankfully I have my Android phone set to quiet hours until 8am when I was getting up today, otherwise I'd have been awakened by a scam health insurance robo-call before then.
bediger4000 11y ago
Exactly who are the owners of "Cardholder Services", or "Account Services" or that company that vaguely implies they're from Microsoft Tech Support? How can I complain? Because I have a load of complaints for each of those companies, and I want to turn them in to the FCC for spoofing their Caller ID, which is illegal. No? Crickets? The sole and only weapon we have is to waste the time of the call center people. In at least some of the "Rachel from Cardholder Services" calls, the call center people are in on the scam - they collect credit card number, last 4 of social, CVV and ZIP code of billing address, which is more than enough to use the credit card number without the cardholder's knowledge. In summary, they deserve what they get, and they know it.
- morninj 11y ago
  Actually, the FCC has several ways for you to report spoofing: https://consumercomplaints.fcc.gov/hc/en-us/articles/202654304-Spoofing-and-Caller-ID https://consumercomplaints.fcc.gov/hc/en-us/articles/2026543...
  - alistairSH 11y ago
    So, instead of ignoring the annoying spoofed/hidden caller, I now have to answer (to try and figure out who is calling me), waste time, try calling back to see if they'll remove me from list, and if not submit forms to FCC in the hopes the FCC can/will do anything? I'm pretty close to the point where I just leave the ringer on my phone off permanently. If somebody calls and I want to speak to them, I'll eventually call back. This sucks because I do speak to my parents on the phone, so we end up playing a lot of phone-tag trying to reach each other.
  - bediger4000 11y ago
    The FCC could enforce anti-caller ID-spoofing without me, if they wanted to. I believe they have the authority. This is just another way to leave the status quo alone, and put the burden on the victims. I've reported any number of robocalls-to-do-not-call numbers to the FCC, and exactly nothing has happened. I have no faith that complaining about spoofed caller ID will cause any action at all.
- 11y ago
ycmbntrthrwaway 11y ago
> I'd prefer not to waste the time of human employees on the phone because they're just minimum wage workers trying to earn a paycheck. My irritation is with the owners of the telemarketing company. It is the reason to waste telemarketing company owners money. As a result, telemarketing would become less effective, and employees would lose their job, but it is a good thing. The goal is not more workplaces. Artificial workplaces are worse than charity or basic income. When people do useless jobs, such as selling tickets, advertising over the phone or on streets etc. they are wasting their time. They can spend it looking for a more interesting job or learning some new skill.
ionised 11y ago
I'm quite happy to waste the time of the guys who I have received calls from recently. They are total assholes and have been harassing people for years if my research into their phone number and company name is anything to go by. The actual (Indian, but the company is based in London) callers have been known to call and hang up repeatedly, insult or threaten the person being called when they demand to be taken off their contacts list ot demand to know where they got their information from in the first place etc.
lucaspiller 11y ago
> the special 3 beeps intro actually works to fool robo-dialers I've setup a service so if the number is withheld or international, it plays a recording asking the user to press 1 to speak to a person. It works 95% of the time. I assume the dialers interpret it as an answer machine so don't connect the call to a real person. A couple of family members have withheld numbers, and they know they just need to press 1 as soon as they here it to reach us.
- ultramancool 11y ago
  Almost every single telemarketing call I get these days is coming from not only my own area code but also my own prefix (using random, clearly spoofed numbers). Incredibly annoying, it's at the point where I don't answer the phone for anyone in my own prefix who I don't already have in contacts.

by jasode 11y ago

davorb 11y ago

> My irritation is with the owners of the telemarketing company. Sadly, the best way to do this is to make it less profitable for them to employ these business practices. And there are only two ways for you to do that: don't buy their products and force them to spend more money per sale (i.e. waste their time).

ycmbntrthrwaway 11y ago
> Sadly Why "sadly"? It is great that we can drive them out of the market just by not paying them, without laws, politics and any kind of coercion.
- MiddleEndian 11y ago
  They can harass you at will, just because a small percentage of the people they harass are into it. How is that not an issue for the law?

coldpie 11y ago

Nah, fuck 'em. If you have no respect for me or my time, I have no respect for yours.

ryanhuff 11y ago

The employees are there to make calls. I don't see having to deal with a robot as wasting their time, since they are hopefully being paid regardless. Now, if they are being paid on commission, then they are part of the problem, and removing the incentive will help correct the annoyance.

acveilleux 11y ago
Most call center employee's continuing employment is predicated on making sales, if they don't meet a quota they get fired.
- ant6n 11y ago
  ...thus removing the incentive and help correcting the annoyance.
- coldpie 11y ago
  I feel like we might be in a better situation if we had a strong social safety net for the unemployed instead of annoying me and scamming old people to support the otherwise-unemployed. (Don't forget to vote, folks.)

Lawtonfogle 11y ago

>I'd prefer not to waste the time of human employees on the phone because they're just minimum wage workers trying to earn a paycheck. I'm still perfectly fine wasting their time. Honestly, I don't get this reasoning that if they are doing it for a small financial gain, they are resolved of any blame for any harm they cause (even if the harm is just annoying me and wasting my time). Yet I see the reasoning being used in multiple instances where they are causing hassle or worse (say when they lie to you about whats in phone contracts, which is my pet peeve).

jasode 11y ago
>I don't get this reasoning that ... they are resolved of any blame ... annoying me ... causing hassle Yes, I agree that annoyance is being made and hassle is being caused but I assign the "they" part more to the owners of the businesses rather than the low-level employees working the phones. Those workers are just cogs in a wheel. Therefore, I don't derive any satisfaction of justice by making employees suffer the games of an AI Turing Test. On the other hand, I am happy when business owners pay $100,000 fines for ignoring the Do-Not-Call list. The workers vs owners distinction is the same for fast-food cashiers asking "do you want to Super Size that?", or Radio Shack employee requesting my phone number for their database, or a retail employee trying to sell me an "extended warranty". For each of those situations, I'm annoyed but it's not necessary for me to socially shame the low-level workers with rants about obesity and high-fat consumption, the dangers of privacy invasion and identity theft, and the financial foolishness of 3rd-party warranties. All those employees are just cogs in a wheel and they are required to follow a script and upsell those things. Otherwise, they are fired. I see most telemarketing employees in equivalent situations++. Waging war with those low-level employees seems like fighting the wrong layer. Instead, just don't spend money with the business or utilize technical tricks (e.g. phone TeleZapper). ++To level set, I'm not talking about criminal activities such as scammers making calls to trick senior citizens into wiring their life savings. I'm talking about the single mother or starving college student who sees a job ad for "$8/hour tele-sales" and hopes to get money for diapers or ramen noodles. The telemarketing I was thinking of was newspaper subscriptions, church donations, burglar alarms monitoring, etc.
- 11y ago

ricardobeat 11y ago

If the end goal is to defeat telemarketing, they will end up jobless regardless.

JohnTHaller 11y ago

Nearly everything sold by telemarketing is a scam or predatory in some way. If you're already on the do not call list, then every sales call you get that's not from a company you're already doing business with is a scam. I have no issue with wasting as much of their time as possible. Side note: Thankfully I have my Android phone set to quiet hours until 8am when I was getting up today, otherwise I'd have been awakened by a scam health insurance robo-call before then.

bediger4000 11y ago

Exactly who are the owners of "Cardholder Services", or "Account Services" or that company that vaguely implies they're from Microsoft Tech Support? How can I complain? Because I have a load of complaints for each of those companies, and I want to turn them in to the FCC for spoofing their Caller ID, which is illegal. No? Crickets? The sole and only weapon we have is to waste the time of the call center people. In at least some of the "Rachel from Cardholder Services" calls, the call center people are in on the scam - they collect credit card number, last 4 of social, CVV and ZIP code of billing address, which is more than enough to use the credit card number without the cardholder's knowledge. In summary, they deserve what they get, and they know it.

morninj 11y ago
Actually, the FCC has several ways for you to report spoofing: https://consumercomplaints.fcc.gov/hc/en-us/articles/202654304-Spoofing-and-Caller-ID https://consumercomplaints.fcc.gov/hc/en-us/articles/2026543...
- alistairSH 11y ago
  So, instead of ignoring the annoying spoofed/hidden caller, I now have to answer (to try and figure out who is calling me), waste time, try calling back to see if they'll remove me from list, and if not submit forms to FCC in the hopes the FCC can/will do anything? I'm pretty close to the point where I just leave the ringer on my phone off permanently. If somebody calls and I want to speak to them, I'll eventually call back. This sucks because I do speak to my parents on the phone, so we end up playing a lot of phone-tag trying to reach each other.
- bediger4000 11y ago
  The FCC could enforce anti-caller ID-spoofing without me, if they wanted to. I believe they have the authority. This is just another way to leave the status quo alone, and put the burden on the victims. I've reported any number of robocalls-to-do-not-call numbers to the FCC, and exactly nothing has happened. I have no faith that complaining about spoofed caller ID will cause any action at all.
11y ago

ycmbntrthrwaway 11y ago

> I'd prefer not to waste the time of human employees on the phone because they're just minimum wage workers trying to earn a paycheck. My irritation is with the owners of the telemarketing company. It is the reason to waste telemarketing company owners money. As a result, telemarketing would become less effective, and employees would lose their job, but it is a good thing. The goal is not more workplaces. Artificial workplaces are worse than charity or basic income. When people do useless jobs, such as selling tickets, advertising over the phone or on streets etc. they are wasting their time. They can spend it looking for a more interesting job or learning some new skill.

ionised 11y ago

I'm quite happy to waste the time of the guys who I have received calls from recently. They are total assholes and have been harassing people for years if my research into their phone number and company name is anything to go by. The actual (Indian, but the company is based in London) callers have been known to call and hang up repeatedly, insult or threaten the person being called when they demand to be taken off their contacts list ot demand to know where they got their information from in the first place etc.

lucaspiller 11y ago

> the special 3 beeps intro actually works to fool robo-dialers I've setup a service so if the number is withheld or international, it plays a recording asking the user to press 1 to speak to a person. It works 95% of the time. I assume the dialers interpret it as an answer machine so don't connect the call to a real person. A couple of family members have withheld numbers, and they know they just need to press 1 as soon as they here it to reach us.

ultramancool 11y ago
Almost every single telemarketing call I get these days is coming from not only my own area code but also my own prefix (using random, clearly spoofed numbers). Incredibly annoying, it's at the point where I don't answer the phone for anyone in my own prefix who I don't already have in contacts.