Fun_People Archive
25 Feb
Re: Telemarketer Torment Techniques (2)

Date: Sat, 25 Feb 95 14:30:57 PST
From: Peter Langston <psl>
To: Fun_People
Subject: Re: Telemarketer Torment Techniques (2)

From: Hal Glatzer <0002018560@mcimail.com>

Reminds me of how I used to deal with Jehovah's Witnesses, when I lived
in a house.  An adult and a teenager would show up on my doorstep on
Saturday mornings like clockwork, so I took to greeting them in my
bathrobe.  Engaging them in a theological discussion, I would gesticulate
wildly with my arms, causing the tie of the robe to loosen.  After a
minute or so, the robe would part open, and the adult JW would steer
the teen away in great haste.  Worked every time.

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From: Craig Harris <charris@u.washington.edu>

Last week I tried a different tactic.....

At the first near-pause in the preliminary intro, I announced,
 
 "I'm not going to buy that, would you rather talk about something else
or get back to work?"

Apparantly getting back to work wasn't that enticing because we somehow 
ended up talking about relative merits and appeal of Quenton Tarantino's 
films.

How many points do I get for that?

______________________________________________________________________________

From: <drz@shadowplay.com>

I have been using a much simpler approach for some years. It involves
listening for a minute, to get what they are selling, telling them that
it really sounds interesting and I am in the market for it, and then
saying
     "Oh, my gosh, my dinner is boiling over on the stove, I need to go
shut it off, I'll be right back..." and then see how long they stay on
the phone. If you have a speaker phone, you can listen and give yourself
500 points a minute, and do something else at the same time. No points
off for clanking a few pans or cursing in the background...

© 1995 Peter Langston