I think at some point, people who work in call centers come to genuinely hate the people they're bothering and the goal becomes not to sell products or services, but to bother their victims even more.

"Oh, so you're gonna put yourself on a national 'do not call' list and tell me not to call you? WELL, I'M MOVING TO CANADA, MOTHERFUCKER! I FUCKING HATE CANADA, BUT I WILL MOVE THERE JUST SO I CAN KEEP CALLING YOUR SORRY ASS! I WILL PUT YOUR HOUSE UNDER SURVEILLANCE SO I CAN TIME THE CALLS TO MAXIMIZE THE INCONVENIENCE TO YOU! I WILL NOT BE DENIED!!!"

Yeah. I'm sure people quit call center jobs due to a lack of interested customers.

Here's something I've done sometimes.

"I used to work in phone sales, and i know how tough it is. I hope you're having a great day, but i'm going to hang up now."

Click.

i think this guy is full of shit. It would be nice (actually it wouldn't) if you could make someone feel guilty for being bothered just by paying them a little respect,but c'mon! I think he's grasping at straws.

Hang on, who still gets live telemarketing phone calls? I get like a trillion BS calls a year, and every one of them is a recording from a number that doesn't exist when you call it back. I got through to an actual human one time on one of these calls by entering in pi to the fifty third place on the automation system, but the rest are completely one sided. They don't want to talk to us either.

The next step in technology is going to be automated secretaries in our phones so machines can screen machine calls for us.

I haven't received a telemarketing call in at least six years, when I last lived in a house with a land line.

I always said "Thanks, but I'm not interested" and if they kept talking anyway (which they often did) I just hung the phone up. I don't understand the point in going out of your way to be extra rude to someone who's just doing their job and cuss them out, threaten them, insult them, etc. It's much easier and less time consuming to just hang up.

This guy sucks and hasn't got a clue if he honestly thinks this will work enough to make a difference.

They're annoying as hell but quite as annoying as listening to stories of how proud people are that they messed with some telemarketer. Nothing makes me inwardly roll my eyes more at a gathering and slink off at those sad assholes.

It's not even worth answering an unknown number anymore. If it's important they'll leave a voice mail.

Eh? Who wastes their time saying any words at all to telemarketers?

Just hang up immediately as soon as you realize it's some sort of solicitation.

I was a bill collector for about six months. I got a cut of every bill paid, and thus I was actually motivated to harass. We were taught that in no uncertain terms were the laws ever going to be applied in a prosecutorial sense to employees of the firm, and since the firm had an in-house lawyer who argued (when it very rarely came up) that the firm wasn't responsible for the irresponsible acts of it's employees, it was an unenforceable scenario and absolutely nothing would stop us from bullying, destroying lives, embarrassing employees to their employers, et cetera et cetera et cetera.

The most dangerous thing you can be is a salaried employee who has access to skiptracing databases, a six line phone, and no scruples whatsoever.

It was also the only time in my life I was what I'd consider an alcoholic.

Why is this under "religious"? Call center 'Objection Czars' are terrible, but even they deserve better than a "religious" tag.

Ah yes, telemarketing. The transitional phase between the old days of door-to-door sales and the modern age of email spam.

Fuck these people.

I've worked in a plain old call center before, so I'm just going to five star this based on the title and the screengrab and move the fuck on. I didn't hate the customers, I just hated myself.