I hate telemarketers

I’ve had a landline for thirty years. Don’t call it. I won’t answer. You can leave a message, but don’t expect a speedy reply. I check the messages maybe once a week.

I’m guessing you know why. You probably don’t answer your phone either. It seems like 90% of calls to my landline are spam, asinine telemarketers. And now they’ve invaded cellphones.

So if I get a call on my cell from a number I’m not familiar with I let it go to voicemail. And this is becoming more and more frequent.

Here’s the thing I don’t understand – who in their right mind is going to listen to a sales pitch and buy something in 2018 from a stranger calling on the phone?  Right.  Idiots. 

I know there’s that theory if a guy goes up to a hundred women and says “Hey, you wanna fuck?” he’s going to get slapped 99 times and then get laid. But this is like getting slapped one billion times before getting lucky. Even Quasimodo could get better odds.

And along the same (land)lines – pop up ads. They’re annoying and infuriating and the result is not a sale but hating the product. So who thinks that’s a great strategy? Have you ever bought anything based on a pop up ad? And it’s gotten to the point where there are now websites I just won’t go to anymore because I know I’ll be bombarded by pop up ads. So not only does the product lose out, the greedy website that accepts their sponsorship does too. Some sites won't let you enter if you've blocked pop up ads.  Great marketing all around.

The most mystifying thing to me is that the telemarketers KNOW we hate them and do it anyway. They have thousands of numbers so if you block one they keep coming. Wouldn’t you think that if I blocked your number I am not a good lead to buy your stupid land or insurance or whatever?

Anyway, I bring this up today because primaries are coming in many states and it’s a time you would like to cold call people and remind them to vote. You would like to reach undecided people and state the case for sanity. But again, who answers cold calls? The idiots.

Technology has made it that much harder to reach people who don’t own swampland in Florida. Oh well, at least I get in my 10,000 steps by going door-to-door.

from By Ken Levine