phone spam
Recently I had someone call my mobile phone asking whether I wanted to change phone providers. I asked them if they could hold the line - then I put my phone down and went back to work.
It took over eight minutes before they hung up on me.
Next time someone phone-spams you try to beat that record, please post a comment on this blog entry if you can beat eight minutes and twenty seconds of dead-air.
The call might have lasted longer if I had periodically picked up the phone and said "I'm almost ready". It's something I may test in the future.
6 comments:
My wife tells me that people working in call centres actively welcome this; it's an ideal opportunity for them to go off for an extra break without reprisals from their supervisor. So in fact you're doing the individual people a good turn, although of course not the company that employs them (which should be the real target of ire); this makes it a much better approach than ranting at some poor unfortunate.
Uhm, I'm usually do it the other way round, the calls are <20 secs and are like:
- Hello, I'm foo from bar, and want to talk about your telephone-bill.
- Hi, I'm not interested.
- Oh *pause* have a nice day.
But this does not solve the "problem", neither your sollution does. :-(
whoa, it's tarpitting phone spammers.
You could do what a friend of mine does when he gets telemarketers from India call: he talks about cricket and asks for recipes.
He once spent 45 minutes on the phone with a roomful of Indian telemarketers all giving him their mothers' version of coconut curries.
But this does not solve the "problem", neither your sollution does. :-(
Russell's solution does solve the problem because it changes the economics of telemarketing: see Wasting telemarketer's time
Hi, I found this nice counterscript, maybe one could give this a try :)
http://www.xs4all.nl/~egbg/counterscript.html
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