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I guess it must work, or they wouldn't keep doing it, but why would anyone entertain a cold caller to any degree? In my experience there's a 0% chance it will b

I guess it must work, or they wouldn't keep doing it, but why would anyone entertain a cold caller to any degree? In my experience there's a 0% chance it will be useful or a good deal, and a very high likelyhood it's an outright scam. I do think it's good to be polite to anyone who calls, but it doesn't matter what they say or ask, the answer is always a polite "Please don't call me again."

sumtechguy 2y ago
Most cons like that are have huge failure rates. But all it takes is one or two to fall for it for it to be worthwhile.
idontwantthis 2y ago
It’s a lot better than the scam calls I get where an Indian guy says “Do you remember signing up for x, you won!” on a scratchy connection where I can clearly hear everyone else in the crowded room calling other people.
scrapcode 2y ago
I'm interested in more lit on the subject, but I never understood how anyone sells anything via cold-calling. I understand why SPAM works - because it has a very small barrier to entry and it works on the idea of converting a small fraction of messages sent. But cold-calling takes man-hours and I can only imagine it's sole purpose is to catch individuals that simply would rather pay you to end the call rather than say "no." Even worse is door-to-door sales. My neighborhood has big "no soliciting" signs at the entrances, but at certain times of the year we get huge swaths of salesmen and it's typically for the exact same services at different times of year. Once I was working on my boat late at night in my garage with the door halfway open. I had a pesticide service salesman zip up my driveway on a segway and come inside my garage and start pitching. I couldn't help but to lose my stuff on him. Do these tactics really work? Is it a certain demographic? Because I just don't grok.
- ryandrake 2y ago
  A lot of people are gullible and/or socially have trouble saying "no" to people. I think cold calling and door-to-door sales preys on that. I have elderly family members who hate getting telemarketing cold calls, but they are from some time/culture where it's uncomfortable/difficult to directly tell someone "No, I'm not interested. Fuck off." That's often who's falling for these. If I actually needed what the salesman was selling, I would have bought it already myself. This is true for everything I've ever purchased. The fact that they have to push it on me proves that it's negative-EV and I have no problem just hanging up or closing the door. I guess not everyone finds this easy.
  - 6510 2y ago
    This is actually good. "Thanks for your time, the BRAWNDO CORPORATION won't call you again." If you manage to end it in 3-8 seconds they can do 360 such calls in an hour. If the guy costs $12 per hour that works out to little over 3 cent. And then, 20 months later a % of the "fuck off, leave me alone" guys need the product and remember how polite the call was. These usually do a good bit of research. They clearly call for information. If the price is good and they live 3 blocks away there are good odds they let you mow their lawn.
    - somat 2y ago
      Too true, Many people, including myself, tend to say "ha, I have never bought any thing based on an ad or salesman" But often that is not the point, the point is to get it in your head that the product exists. and when you do need one, when faced with several indistinguishable items, you go for the one that feels familiar, the one that was infiltrated into your head months ago. There is nothing super wrong with this, I mean, sales is necessary evil of doing business. necessary, because the whole point is to sell the thing, and evil, because you are coercing someone to do something they otherwise would not have done. But I think there is a healthy ratio here, and I try to make a point(often failing for the reason in the previous paragraph) to avoid products that lean too heavily on the unhealthy side of that ratio. those companies that believe sales is more important than the product.
bboygravity 2y ago
Not efficient compared to what? Compared to online marketing? Or cold emailing? Or talking to random people in the street? I can't actually imagine a more efficient way to get a significant nr of sales from strangers than cold calling personally. Of course contacting people who already know you is better, but the problem for a business is that in most/all cases that list of people who know you is not long enough.
gregschlom 2y ago
Probably because things are a bit different now than in the 80's and 90's? 1. We used to do a lot more business over phone calls back in those days, so people were more willing to entertain cold phone calls 2. Technology has allowed automating phone call scams, so we get a lot more of those nowadays 3. Calling internationally is dirt cheap now, so you can have call centers full of scammers in cheap countries 4. Everyone is using text messaging with their friends and family so phone calls are more likely to be scams
- unsupp0rted 2y ago
  I remember every other TV commercial ending with an address for where to send my self-addressed stamped envelope.
- pixl97 2y ago
  To expand on point 3, unlimited long distance and VOIP. At least before 1984 things like long distance calls where HYPER expensive via AT&T domination of the long distance market. After the breakup the market slowly trended to unlimited long distance. After that point it required the invention of high speed internet and compression algorithms. Calling internationally over dedicated channels remained insanely expensive even after long distance mostly disappeared. Now the foreign call is handled via IP until it reaches the country of origin and is dumped into POTS via a local VOIP provider.
djohnston 2y ago
Old people are lonely. It’s not complicated.
6510 2y ago
After we've called you 50 times using different company names the deals get really competitive. Is Monday good for you?
Tectosage 2y ago
This pitch worked much better in the 80s and 90s when A) most investors had a broker not just for advice, but because there was no easy way to trade individually or get live stock quotes until the internet was widespread and matured B) telephone sales in general were more common then and less likely to be a scam (Stratton Oakmont and other boiler rooms played a large role in shifting public opinion on this) C) The most desirable prospects (High Net Worth Individuals) were accustomed to dealing with legitimate brokers over the phone and being solicited by brokers from other legitimate firms in such a way D) The markets were raging in such a way that everyone had FOMO and was dying to hear of a hot new tip Almost nobody legitimate in the financial advising world acquires customers via cold call pitching anymore. Cold calling is still part of the toolkit for other sales niches (eg, tech sales) but it's a tough road with a low success rate.
- pixl97 2y ago
  >telephone sales in general were more common then and less likely to be a scam Caller had to pay long distance costs at the time and really until you got in the later 90s early 2000's did you start seeing unlimited long distance everywhere. Getting cold calls from random people way back then was super rate because it was expensive.
  - Tectosage 2y ago
    This is a great point. "More common" wasn't the best choice of words because it implies a higher frequency, which was not the case. "More acceptable/accepted/normalized" would have been better phrasing.
    - cqqxo4zV46cp 2y ago
      I mean, if you want to be pedantic about it, I suppose it depends on whether or not “telephone sales” implies something actually being sold.
  - gary_0 2y ago
    "Extremely cheap global telecommunications accessible to everyone" came with a lot of drawbacks we didn't consider at the time they started to become viable. Although all the spam in our inboxes should have been a clue.
carlosjobim 2y ago
Go ask the elderly why they love cold callers and scammers. It is beyond my comprehension how their minds work. If Moses split the sea in front of their own eyes they wouldn't trust him to lend him five dollars, but as soon as there's a scammer on the phone or on the internet, wallets open wide.
- HeyLaughingBoy 2y ago
  Well, that's where the word "phony" comes from.
  - lupire 2y ago
    That's a phony etymology of "phony", which predates telephony.
- djeastm 2y ago
  I would guess many of them are lonely and are just happy for the attention. My father made a friend, an elderly man, who was being taken advantage of by some locals. Basically helping themselves to anything in his house, asking for cash, drives places, etc. And he was glad to give it because he had no one else in his life at the time. What's money with no one to share it with? Finally met my Dad, who, thankfully, got his friend to move out-of-state to live with his only surviving family before he passed
missedthecue 2y ago
It surprises me too. When my current company was getting off the ground last year I was cold calling to find our first customers for our MVP. This is in the B2B software space. I would make about 70 calls a day and it would shock me how many people not only pick up, but stay on the phone to hear me out. I landed a number of accounts this way to get the momentum rolling. And it was awkward for me too, I don't even have a background in sales. I'm sure a talented salesperson could have done much better than me at retaining their attention after the first opening sentences.
- immibis 2y ago
  I think it's more welcome in B2B transactions because there are less ways to find products and less transactions in general. Whatever you're selling, there's a good chance the company didn't even know they wanted it until you reached out to them. It goes like this at trade shows too. I can find the available types of pizza by visiting any pizza shop, but to find the available types of 5G base station I'll probably have to attend Mobile World Congress, or they'll have to discover me (if I'm a more publicly visible and quite big company) and then call me.
pavlov 2y ago
I remember getting a cold call in 2014 from (supposedly) an investment company in Hong Kong. I was curious to hear what kind of pitch they had for someone like me living in Finland. They claimed to have access to a block of NVidia stock available at a discount to the market price (I think it was around 10-15% off) and they needed investor funds immediately to buy the whole block. The minimum investment was $10k. When I sounded interested, my call was moved to a different young man who had a much more aggressive tone. That's where I hung up. After the call, I remember thinking: "This is actually a good investment idea. I should buy some NVDA, but not from these weirdos in Hong Kong." — Dear reader, did I buy the stock then? Of course not. Looks like NVDA is up about 260x since that call. (Insane. I had to double-check that.) Imagine if someone actually sent $10k to this cold-calling Hong Kong company and just forgot about it. Now that $10k would be worth 2.6 million dollars. You see NVidia in the news and get excited about cashing out to buy a mansion... You call their phone in Hong Kong. "This number has been disconnected." No trace online of the investment advisor who got your $10k. That would sting far worse than just realizing early on that you'd been scammed.
- lupire 2y ago
  This is a very common active Bitcoin "investment" scam today.
  - TacticalCoder 2y ago
    > This is a very common active Bitcoin "investment" scam today. Are you saying that now that BlackRock's CEO is endorsing it, El Savlador's president is buying it as reserve for the country and Trump promising to use Bitcoin as a strategic reserve, it could go 260x and that, hence, if we get such a scammy phone call we should hung up and open an account on Coinbase (a HN unicorn btw) to buy Bitcoins?
- cynicalsecurity 2y ago
  You would send them 10K USD and you could forget about 10K forever. What a great opportunity. I'm not even sure the were from Hong Kong, probably some scam from mainland China.
icedchai 2y ago
Cold callers were less of a problem 30 years ago. Now the entire US phone system is open to competition. You might think that was a good thing, but it's also what allows cheap VOIP calls appearing to be from "local" numbers to bother you night and day. Bring back Ma Bell. She wouldn't have put up with this crap.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
proteal 2y ago
I think cold calling works decently for a certain subset of business people. There are folks out there that have genuine needs that salespeople can meet. At my last job, I didn't have authority to buy nor any real interest in the risk that such an opportunity could mean for the business. My boss, on the other hand, had lots of authority and would occasionally listen to pitches because they could benefit both parties. 95% of the time things didn't go further than the first call, but every now and then it would be a good fit. Anyone more senior than him probably didn't have the time for cold calls, but there is a sweet spot in the org where they can be effective. Since my boss had the ear of the budget setters, he could pitch them the idea and reap the benefit. Like other commenters have pointed out, cold calling and spam aren't so different in the sense that if they never worked, nobody would do them. For example, I worked with with the woman in charge of our modeling team. She had a big issue managing a growing, international workflow. They used spreadsheets when the team was smaller, but that solution didn't scale and was starting to show cracks. Her boss gave her significant budget to fix the problem, but she had no idea how to spend it. I told her that one call to a Jira sales rep (or equivalent) and all her problems would evaporate. One call could have potentially saved our firm tons of money and provided another firm with a very good, sticky customer. As far as I'm aware, she was so overworked as-is that she never reached out/researched it.
tombert 2y ago
There was once a recruiter who cold called me and I ended up taking the job that they reached out about, so I guess it works sometimes? Obviously recruiting is a bit different, because of course I have to go interview at a place and whatnot, but it's the only example of where a cold call worked on me.
- snotrockets 2y ago
  No it ain’t: recruiting is sales. You’re selling a candidate on the job, and your employer the candidate.
IAmGraydon 2y ago
This is like asking who would ever click on an online ad, yet they sell billions of dollars of merchandise every year. It's a numbers game.
tootie 2y ago
Even with modern marketing like tv ads, display ads, or even paper mailers the expected conversion rate is tiny. It's always a numbers game. If you have a sales script that captures 0.7% of people who hear it while your competition is capturing 0.4% then you have a huge advantage. But you still have to reach thousands of targets to sustain a business.
yieldcrv 2y ago
Retirees are bored and want to feel like they are part of something
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
borski 2y ago
Cold calling still works today. People are gullible and want to believe the best in others. Cynics don’t make good victims.
atum47 2y ago
> but why would anyone entertain a cold caller I'd like for you to meet my dad.
gspencley 2y ago
> I do think it's good to be polite to anyone who calls Out of curiosity, why? It might be (probably is) my asocial personality and the fact that getting interrupted is very triggering for me.* But while I am amenable to the argument that there is no use in being rude to someone who cold calls, I can't help but pick on your choice of words: "good to be polite to anyone" Is it morally good to be polite to someone who wants to harm you? Perhaps if they are physically threatening you and politeness is part of your deescalation strategy. But a cold caller? I like to believe that there is a special rung of hell reserved for cold callers (right next to lawyers and people who talk at the theatre). I don't go out of my way to be mean or nasty to them because there is nothing of value that can come from that. But they certainly don't deserve a "please" in front of "delete this number click" in my personal opinion. * - While I'm not a huge fan of smart phones, they do have one killer feature that has won me over: the ability to set the default ring tone to silence and assign people in my contacts a ring tone that will actually get my attention.
- cynicalsecurity 2y ago
  > Is it morally good to be polite to someone who wants to harm you? It's not. People who advocate for it here are cold callers themselves.
tonye01477 2y ago
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sumtechguy 2y ago

Most cons like that are have huge failure rates. But all it takes is one or two to fall for it for it to be worthwhile.

idontwantthis 2y ago

It’s a lot better than the scam calls I get where an Indian guy says “Do you remember signing up for x, you won!” on a scratchy connection where I can clearly hear everyone else in the crowded room calling other people.

scrapcode 2y ago

I'm interested in more lit on the subject, but I never understood how anyone sells anything via cold-calling. I understand why SPAM works - because it has a very small barrier to entry and it works on the idea of converting a small fraction of messages sent. But cold-calling takes man-hours and I can only imagine it's sole purpose is to catch individuals that simply would rather pay you to end the call rather than say "no." Even worse is door-to-door sales. My neighborhood has big "no soliciting" signs at the entrances, but at certain times of the year we get huge swaths of salesmen and it's typically for the exact same services at different times of year. Once I was working on my boat late at night in my garage with the door halfway open. I had a pesticide service salesman zip up my driveway on a segway and come inside my garage and start pitching. I couldn't help but to lose my stuff on him. Do these tactics really work? Is it a certain demographic? Because I just don't grok.

ryandrake 2y ago
A lot of people are gullible and/or socially have trouble saying "no" to people. I think cold calling and door-to-door sales preys on that. I have elderly family members who hate getting telemarketing cold calls, but they are from some time/culture where it's uncomfortable/difficult to directly tell someone "No, I'm not interested. Fuck off." That's often who's falling for these. If I actually needed what the salesman was selling, I would have bought it already myself. This is true for everything I've ever purchased. The fact that they have to push it on me proves that it's negative-EV and I have no problem just hanging up or closing the door. I guess not everyone finds this easy.
- 6510 2y ago
  This is actually good. "Thanks for your time, the BRAWNDO CORPORATION won't call you again." If you manage to end it in 3-8 seconds they can do 360 such calls in an hour. If the guy costs $12 per hour that works out to little over 3 cent. And then, 20 months later a % of the "fuck off, leave me alone" guys need the product and remember how polite the call was. These usually do a good bit of research. They clearly call for information. If the price is good and they live 3 blocks away there are good odds they let you mow their lawn.
  - somat 2y ago
    Too true, Many people, including myself, tend to say "ha, I have never bought any thing based on an ad or salesman" But often that is not the point, the point is to get it in your head that the product exists. and when you do need one, when faced with several indistinguishable items, you go for the one that feels familiar, the one that was infiltrated into your head months ago. There is nothing super wrong with this, I mean, sales is necessary evil of doing business. necessary, because the whole point is to sell the thing, and evil, because you are coercing someone to do something they otherwise would not have done. But I think there is a healthy ratio here, and I try to make a point(often failing for the reason in the previous paragraph) to avoid products that lean too heavily on the unhealthy side of that ratio. those companies that believe sales is more important than the product.

bboygravity 2y ago

Not efficient compared to what? Compared to online marketing? Or cold emailing? Or talking to random people in the street? I can't actually imagine a more efficient way to get a significant nr of sales from strangers than cold calling personally. Of course contacting people who already know you is better, but the problem for a business is that in most/all cases that list of people who know you is not long enough.

gregschlom 2y ago

Probably because things are a bit different now than in the 80's and 90's? 1. We used to do a lot more business over phone calls back in those days, so people were more willing to entertain cold phone calls 2. Technology has allowed automating phone call scams, so we get a lot more of those nowadays 3. Calling internationally is dirt cheap now, so you can have call centers full of scammers in cheap countries 4. Everyone is using text messaging with their friends and family so phone calls are more likely to be scams

unsupp0rted 2y ago
I remember every other TV commercial ending with an address for where to send my self-addressed stamped envelope.
pixl97 2y ago
To expand on point 3, unlimited long distance and VOIP. At least before 1984 things like long distance calls where HYPER expensive via AT&T domination of the long distance market. After the breakup the market slowly trended to unlimited long distance. After that point it required the invention of high speed internet and compression algorithms. Calling internationally over dedicated channels remained insanely expensive even after long distance mostly disappeared. Now the foreign call is handled via IP until it reaches the country of origin and is dumped into POTS via a local VOIP provider.

djohnston 2y ago

Old people are lonely. It’s not complicated.

6510 2y ago

After we've called you 50 times using different company names the deals get really competitive. Is Monday good for you?

Tectosage 2y ago

This pitch worked much better in the 80s and 90s when A) most investors had a broker not just for advice, but because there was no easy way to trade individually or get live stock quotes until the internet was widespread and matured B) telephone sales in general were more common then and less likely to be a scam (Stratton Oakmont and other boiler rooms played a large role in shifting public opinion on this) C) The most desirable prospects (High Net Worth Individuals) were accustomed to dealing with legitimate brokers over the phone and being solicited by brokers from other legitimate firms in such a way D) The markets were raging in such a way that everyone had FOMO and was dying to hear of a hot new tip Almost nobody legitimate in the financial advising world acquires customers via cold call pitching anymore. Cold calling is still part of the toolkit for other sales niches (eg, tech sales) but it's a tough road with a low success rate.

pixl97 2y ago
>telephone sales in general were more common then and less likely to be a scam Caller had to pay long distance costs at the time and really until you got in the later 90s early 2000's did you start seeing unlimited long distance everywhere. Getting cold calls from random people way back then was super rate because it was expensive.
- Tectosage 2y ago
  This is a great point. "More common" wasn't the best choice of words because it implies a higher frequency, which was not the case. "More acceptable/accepted/normalized" would have been better phrasing.
  - cqqxo4zV46cp 2y ago
    I mean, if you want to be pedantic about it, I suppose it depends on whether or not “telephone sales” implies something actually being sold.
- gary_0 2y ago
  "Extremely cheap global telecommunications accessible to everyone" came with a lot of drawbacks we didn't consider at the time they started to become viable. Although all the spam in our inboxes should have been a clue.

carlosjobim 2y ago

Go ask the elderly why they love cold callers and scammers. It is beyond my comprehension how their minds work. If Moses split the sea in front of their own eyes they wouldn't trust him to lend him five dollars, but as soon as there's a scammer on the phone or on the internet, wallets open wide.

HeyLaughingBoy 2y ago
Well, that's where the word "phony" comes from.
- lupire 2y ago
  That's a phony etymology of "phony", which predates telephony.
djeastm 2y ago
I would guess many of them are lonely and are just happy for the attention. My father made a friend, an elderly man, who was being taken advantage of by some locals. Basically helping themselves to anything in his house, asking for cash, drives places, etc. And he was glad to give it because he had no one else in his life at the time. What's money with no one to share it with? Finally met my Dad, who, thankfully, got his friend to move out-of-state to live with his only surviving family before he passed

missedthecue 2y ago

It surprises me too. When my current company was getting off the ground last year I was cold calling to find our first customers for our MVP. This is in the B2B software space. I would make about 70 calls a day and it would shock me how many people not only pick up, but stay on the phone to hear me out. I landed a number of accounts this way to get the momentum rolling. And it was awkward for me too, I don't even have a background in sales. I'm sure a talented salesperson could have done much better than me at retaining their attention after the first opening sentences.

immibis 2y ago
I think it's more welcome in B2B transactions because there are less ways to find products and less transactions in general. Whatever you're selling, there's a good chance the company didn't even know they wanted it until you reached out to them. It goes like this at trade shows too. I can find the available types of pizza by visiting any pizza shop, but to find the available types of 5G base station I'll probably have to attend Mobile World Congress, or they'll have to discover me (if I'm a more publicly visible and quite big company) and then call me.

pavlov 2y ago

I remember getting a cold call in 2014 from (supposedly) an investment company in Hong Kong. I was curious to hear what kind of pitch they had for someone like me living in Finland. They claimed to have access to a block of NVidia stock available at a discount to the market price (I think it was around 10-15% off) and they needed investor funds immediately to buy the whole block. The minimum investment was $10k. When I sounded interested, my call was moved to a different young man who had a much more aggressive tone. That's where I hung up. After the call, I remember thinking: "This is actually a good investment idea. I should buy some NVDA, but not from these weirdos in Hong Kong." — Dear reader, did I buy the stock then? Of course not. Looks like NVDA is up about 260x since that call. (Insane. I had to double-check that.) Imagine if someone actually sent $10k to this cold-calling Hong Kong company and just forgot about it. Now that $10k would be worth 2.6 million dollars. You see NVidia in the news and get excited about cashing out to buy a mansion... You call their phone in Hong Kong. "This number has been disconnected." No trace online of the investment advisor who got your $10k. That would sting far worse than just realizing early on that you'd been scammed.

lupire 2y ago
This is a very common active Bitcoin "investment" scam today.
- TacticalCoder 2y ago
  > This is a very common active Bitcoin "investment" scam today. Are you saying that now that BlackRock's CEO is endorsing it, El Savlador's president is buying it as reserve for the country and Trump promising to use Bitcoin as a strategic reserve, it could go 260x and that, hence, if we get such a scammy phone call we should hung up and open an account on Coinbase (a HN unicorn btw) to buy Bitcoins?
cynicalsecurity 2y ago
You would send them 10K USD and you could forget about 10K forever. What a great opportunity. I'm not even sure the were from Hong Kong, probably some scam from mainland China.

icedchai 2y ago

Cold callers were less of a problem 30 years ago. Now the entire US phone system is open to competition. You might think that was a good thing, but it's also what allows cheap VOIP calls appearing to be from "local" numbers to bother you night and day. Bring back Ma Bell. She wouldn't have put up with this crap.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

proteal 2y ago

I think cold calling works decently for a certain subset of business people. There are folks out there that have genuine needs that salespeople can meet. At my last job, I didn't have authority to buy nor any real interest in the risk that such an opportunity could mean for the business. My boss, on the other hand, had lots of authority and would occasionally listen to pitches because they could benefit both parties. 95% of the time things didn't go further than the first call, but every now and then it would be a good fit. Anyone more senior than him probably didn't have the time for cold calls, but there is a sweet spot in the org where they can be effective. Since my boss had the ear of the budget setters, he could pitch them the idea and reap the benefit. Like other commenters have pointed out, cold calling and spam aren't so different in the sense that if they never worked, nobody would do them. For example, I worked with with the woman in charge of our modeling team. She had a big issue managing a growing, international workflow. They used spreadsheets when the team was smaller, but that solution didn't scale and was starting to show cracks. Her boss gave her significant budget to fix the problem, but she had no idea how to spend it. I told her that one call to a Jira sales rep (or equivalent) and all her problems would evaporate. One call could have potentially saved our firm tons of money and provided another firm with a very good, sticky customer. As far as I'm aware, she was so overworked as-is that she never reached out/researched it.

tombert 2y ago

There was once a recruiter who cold called me and I ended up taking the job that they reached out about, so I guess it works sometimes? Obviously recruiting is a bit different, because of course I have to go interview at a place and whatnot, but it's the only example of where a cold call worked on me.

snotrockets 2y ago
No it ain’t: recruiting is sales. You’re selling a candidate on the job, and your employer the candidate.

IAmGraydon 2y ago

This is like asking who would ever click on an online ad, yet they sell billions of dollars of merchandise every year. It's a numbers game.

tootie 2y ago

Even with modern marketing like tv ads, display ads, or even paper mailers the expected conversion rate is tiny. It's always a numbers game. If you have a sales script that captures 0.7% of people who hear it while your competition is capturing 0.4% then you have a huge advantage. But you still have to reach thousands of targets to sustain a business.

yieldcrv 2y ago

Retirees are bored and want to feel like they are part of something

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

borski 2y ago

Cold calling still works today. People are gullible and want to believe the best in others. Cynics don’t make good victims.

atum47 2y ago

> but why would anyone entertain a cold caller I'd like for you to meet my dad.

gspencley 2y ago

> I do think it's good to be polite to anyone who calls Out of curiosity, why? It might be (probably is) my asocial personality and the fact that getting interrupted is very triggering for me.* But while I am amenable to the argument that there is no use in being rude to someone who cold calls, I can't help but pick on your choice of words: "good to be polite to anyone" Is it morally good to be polite to someone who wants to harm you? Perhaps if they are physically threatening you and politeness is part of your deescalation strategy. But a cold caller? I like to believe that there is a special rung of hell reserved for cold callers (right next to lawyers and people who talk at the theatre). I don't go out of my way to be mean or nasty to them because there is nothing of value that can come from that. But they certainly don't deserve a "please" in front of "delete this number click" in my personal opinion. * - While I'm not a huge fan of smart phones, they do have one killer feature that has won me over: the ability to set the default ring tone to silence and assign people in my contacts a ring tone that will actually get my attention.

cynicalsecurity 2y ago
> Is it morally good to be polite to someone who wants to harm you? It's not. People who advocate for it here are cold callers themselves.

tonye01477 2y ago

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