Lenny is the most effective time waster for telemarketers I've ever heard. He's truly awesome. I have seen the reverse problem, where the spammer who called i

Lenny is the most effective time waster for telemarketers I've ever heard. He's truly awesome. I have seen the reverse problem, where the spammer who called is trying to get off the phone. Many years ago, I had a job as a manager in an outbound telemarketing center. We had a policy that we could not hang up once the call started -- the person we called had to hang up. Supervisors took escalated calls where someone whose dinner we had interrupted was upset that we called. Very rarely, those calls would then be escalated to me. One time a lawyer in Philadelphia (not even kidding) refused to hang up, and instead continually berated the rep on the phone with cursing. He refused to hang up. The supervisor couldn't calm him down, and had repeated all the stock responses we had apologizing for upsetting them and promising not to call them back. He just kept cursing and said he was going to stay on the phone all night since we couldn't hang up. After about ten minutes of this, the call was escalated to me. I went through the same items with him when he paused to take a breath. He chuckled and said he was going to keep me on the phone all night. I told him that was fine, since I was paid hourly and had gone into overtime five minutes earlier. (It was five after the hour.) I said, I'm now making $22.50 an hour listening to you. I'm happy to stay on all night. How much are you getting paid? That made him hang up. These days, though, most call centers have a policy where the rep on the phone can hang up if the customer continues to curse after being asked to stop. Requiring the rep to stay on the phone beyond that can get an employer in trouble for creating a hostile work environment.