Category Archives: Art

I’ve got it, I think. Perhaps. Let me know if there are unseen flaws in the plan, but if not, spread the word! Maybe we can stop these slimy bastards in their tracks, or at least slow them down significantly.

First, a few thoughts, some talking points, a little gedankenexperiment if you will:

• These calls are annoying, illegal, and 99.99% guaranteed to be scams.
• The people making these calls are often rude and abusive.
• We would love to stop the calls altogether, but we’ve seen how well that works. Unsolicited telemarketing calls have actually been illegal for years, but there’s just about zero-point-zero enforcement, so what’s the use?
• As individuals on the receiving end, we can hang up on them, yell at them, cuss them out, ignore them, or otherwise find a way of dealing with it. However, many of those methods still involve raising our blood pressure.
• The best way to handle these calls is to screen them and just not answer at all — but some people (like those of us sending out resumes and looking for a job) regularly get (or hope to get, hint, hint) calls from unrecognized numbers.
• The companies making these calls are successful because of automation and volume. They only need one in a thousand people to be ignorant or stupid enough to bite on their scam, they’re calling millions of people.
• Humans aren’t making the initial calls, that’s a computer just going down a list calling one number after another.
• The individuals working for these companies (couldn’t they get a job at McDonalds or in a Bangladeshi clothing manufacturer’s sweatshop, they have to sink to this level?) just take call after call after call after call. They’re making their pay based on the number of calls they make and the number of “leads” they can set up.
• If you hang up, the company and their employees don’t care — they just move on to the next call.
• Once you’ve gotten enough of these calls, you can recognize that a call is probably a telemarketer even before they start talking — you answer, get silence for a second or two (the computer on the other end is waiting to see if there’s a live human answering), then a couple of clicks (the computer has detected your presence and is now connecting you to somewhere in southeast Asia or Texas), then someone wanting to sell you aluminum siding.
• It might be spite, but wouldn’t it be really great to find a way to simultaneously: A) Hit the telemarketers where it hurts (i.e., wasting their time), and; B) Have a bit of fun at their expense?

This would be wonderful, a much better option than getting frustrated! We’re not going to let the bastards wear us down! Illegitimi non Carborundum!

Some incompetent telemarketer may have inadvertently revealed to me the way to do this.

The call came in, I heard the silence and the clicks, I hear the background noise of a hundred telemarketers reading their scripts, and then “my” guy starts in:

“Hello, this is Bubba Schimmelfinny with ABC Corp, can I speak to Mark?”

Okay, this was new. I was perfectly ready to simply hang up — but this guy had a wrong number and didn’t know it. Maybe…

“I’m sorry,” I said, “would you like to try again?”

“I need to speak to Mark, please.”

“Would that be Mark as in my brother who lives in Vermont?”

Embarrassed silence for a second. “Oh, I’m sorry, I need to speak to Frank, please.”

“Strike two, would you like to go for three?”

“I don’t understand, maybe… The computer says… Oh, okay, can I speak to George?”

“Keep trying, slugger. You’re not getting warmer, but at least you’re entertaining.”

“I’m sorry for the call.” For a second before he cuts of the call, I can hear chaos and confusion on the other end.

Observations:

1. I was laughing, not grinding my teeth.
2. The buffoon telemarketer had wasted more than thirty precious seconds on a totally useless call.
3. Absolutely the best of all, there was a real problem at their end when their computer had flipped out and was feeding garbage data to the guys on the phone.

And it struck me — WE COULD DO THIS TO THEM ON EVERY SINGLE CALL!

I tested the theory an hour or so later. The call, the silence, the click, the “Hello, can I speak to Paul?”

“Excuse me, Paul who?”

“Isn’t this the number for Paul Willett?”

“Beg your pardon, can you speak up, you’re very faint.”

“I’M TRYING TO REACH PAUL WILLETT.”

“Raul Willard? Never heard of him.”

“No, Paul. Willett!”

“Can you repeat that?”

Long story short (too late!), I kept that poor kid on the phone for nearly a minute, and when he finally hung up he was pretty sure that his computer had fed him garbage on that call.

But that’s just the beginning.

Remember Arlo Guthrie’s “Alice’s Restaurant?” (Wait, what… You don’t?! Okay, go immediately and listen to it, then listen to it again a couple of times because you will realize how perfectly wonderful it is. When you’re ready, come back. I’ll still be here.) His cause was fighting the draft in the Vietnam War era, but his technique will work here as well. Remember how at the end he wants everyone to walk into their draft board, sing a bar of “Alice’s Restaurant”, and walk out? If one person does it… If two people do it… If ten people a day did it… What if a hundred people a day…

So what if 10% of the people answering the calls from telemarketers played this game? (Extra points if you want to keep track of your personal record for how long you can keep someone on the hook.) What if 25% of us did it? What if half of us did it?

The telemarketers would:

1. Be losing money, because their non-productive calls, which currently only cost them a few seconds, would now cost them ten or twenty times as much.
2. Be unsure whether there was an actual problem or not. They could spend tons of money trying to “fix” a problem that doesn’t exist.

This type of thinking is not without other precedents. There are folks who deliberately “bait” the guys sending out the “Nigerian prince” emails to see how much of their time they can waste, with the real goal being to someday set one of these stooges for a sting by law enforcement. We could do something similar, on a much smaller, more personal scale.

Alternatively, you could look at it as a new type of performance art. The new equivalent of “planking” or “Tebowing.”

It could work! What do you think?