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Notice to Companies

January 13, 2011, 2:13 pm

Calling me with a robo-caller, and then putting me on hold for any amount of time other than about 2 seconds, is not going to reach me.  Today I actually was not busy and waited 30 seconds through such a hold before I hung up, and that is a record.  I know that you are concerned about the productivity of your workers, but I am concerned with mine as well.

Tags:
Category: General Business
  • Maddog

    I hang up on the robots and humans. Better to get them on to their next call than delay them and waste my time. See its a win-win. Still it makes my Mom mad when she goes on a tear and I hang up. Any ideas? Heh!

  • http://evilredscandi.blogspot.com Evil Red Scandi

    Ahh... the joys of having a totally hackable Asterisk PBX. For some reason we get tons of calls from polling companies, and my desire to mess with them is far outweighed by the fact that nobody can conduct a poll in less than 90 minutes these days (or so it seems). Additionally, one of my businesses gets an unusually high volume of calls that could be considered sexual harassment. So with Asterisk... if one were so inclined... one could create a blacklist of phone numbers and caller id regexes (anything with " POLL " or "SURVEY" etc) that are automatically forwarded to a special extension. We can manually transfer calls to this extension as well. This extension just plays an endless loop of a sample of South Park's Mr. Garrison saying:

    "You go to hell! You go to hell and you die! I'm going to find out who you are!"

  • Fred from Canuckistan

    I was at home with a cold last week & got called a couple of times with "strange" numbers/robo's.

    It actually waited over 30 seconds - just to see how long it woulf take and then got some sweet talking smoothie telling me I had a $500 credit for a cruise . . . so I pretended to get all excited and tied them up for about 20 minutes with dumb questions.

    Then I explained I was just having some fun, burning up their time & there wasn't any chance of me ever, ever, ever getting sucked into some"free" scam so please take my number out of your data base.

    Made the cold feel better.

  • Rockstone

    You are generous with your time. As soon as there is a delay at all, I hangup. Anyone calling enough people that they need a machine to do the dialing is not someone I want to talk to anyway.

  • IgotBupkis, President, United Anarchist Society

    > Calling me with a robo-caller, and then putting me on hold ...

    Yeah, this sort of crap is hilariously stupid. If you call me, then it's ME you're looking to talk to, not the other way around. I could not care much less if I ever heard of the existence of your company.

    The funny thing is that Citibank does this when it's trying to contact people behind in their payments. Yeah, they REEEEAALY want to talk to you.

    Morons. Now you know how they got into deep financial doo-doo.

    I answer the phone. If i don't hear a human voice within a five-count, i hang up.

  • Nick

    It's also illegal, and you should report it to the FCC (or is it FTC?) if you want it to stop. If they use a robo dialer, by law, a human has to speak to you within something like 5 seconds.

  • chuck martel

    Robo-caller eh? When my phone rings and there isn't anybody talking as soon as I pick it up I assume that it's an obscene call from a mime and hang up.

  • IgotBupkis, President, United Anarchist Society

    > I assume that it’s an obscene call from a mime and hang up.

    Contrary to popular wisdom, a mime is not a terrible thing to waste. Preferably with a full-auto spray.

    Uh-oh, am I contributing to a climate of mime-hatred? Dang!