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Geist Creates His Own Do-Not-Call List
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Fri Mar 28, 2008 05:30 PM
from the now-all-those-companies-buy-ads-on-the-do-not-call-website dept.
from the now-all-those-companies-buy-ads-on-the-do-not-call-website dept.
average_cdn writes "Canadians looking to put a stop to pesky telemarketing calls before the federal government's do-not-call registry takes effect this summer have a new tool at their disposal. At IOptOut.ca, Canadians can enter their phone number and e-mail address and simply choose the organizations they would prefer not to hear from while the website generates a mass request that the user be added to those companies' do-not-call lists. The site, a beta version of which was launched yesterday, is the brainchild of University of Ottawa law professor Michael Geist and features information on how to avoid telemarketing calls from more than 140 different companies and organizations. Mr. Geist said that iOptOut helps Canadians finish the job that the do-not-call registry failed to complete."
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Well that's great (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Well that's great (Score:5, Funny)
It's not like they'll be able to support it by selling ads....
Parent
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Very cool! (Score:5, Interesting)
However, I've noticed that since we moved two years ago, and we got a Vonage account, we don't actually get any unsolicited calls (except for the cable company which keeps trying to sell us their home phone service, but that has mostly stopped). I think it's either because we're not in the Bell directory, or because if I go over 500 minutes a month, then I pay some per minute charge, and that technically makes it illegal for telemarketers to call me, just like cell phones.
Re:Very cool! (Score:5, Informative)
Never been called by the same company twice and most just hang up on me without even a good bye.
Parent
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Re:Very cool! (Score:5, Interesting)
Due to unfortunate requirement for food, water, and shelter, I had to be a telemarketer for several years. Truly this was the most painful job I've ever had, and I've worked at Taco Bell. Your strategy of leaving the phone off the hook for a while is not remotely unique. But I assure you, many telemarketers appreciate it. Seriously.
What you may fail to recognize is that telemarketing is a slave driving business. The people on the phone, we didn't make squat off the sales. What we did was maintain our right to continue working a complete day. If you didn't maintain a certain quota, they would simply send you home. And the wages? Well there was this fancy thing called a "differential." What that meant was, if you made X hours in the pay period, your wage would be increased by Y dollars. So to make the meager 7.25/hr. I was told I'd be making, I'd have to work at least 60 of the 80 hours possible in a two week period. Obviously not a difficult thing to do in a normal job but..
Imagine for a moment that you made just enough money to get by, you had maybe $30 a week after all of your bills were paid to buy groceries for you, your wife, and your daughter. You worked as a cold calling sales person, constantly searching but never finding another, more reasonable job. IN the meantime, you went to work each day, starting at 7 am to call the east coast, and sell things that nobody in their right mind would ever want to buy. If you did not make at least two sales per hour on average, you would be sent home before lunch time. Now imagine that, despite working very hard, your two weeks came up and you missed the mark. Suddenly your paycheck wasn't only less because of fewer hours, no, your rate was 30% less, putting you around 50% of what you would normally have made. What the hell would you do?
Not all callcenters are this bad, not all phone jobs as painful, but many are and I hope some of you can have a better understanding of the tenacity of phone sales people.
Oh and another aspect more relevant to your "method" is that the calls must be made constantly. Non-stop, save a few very short breaks throughout the day for the restroom. That means that the moment you hang up, the phone immediately calls another person. In fact, when enough agents are on the floor, the phone system PRE-DIALS so that when you click off one call, you're IMMEDIATELY on another. This goes on all day long. You try that sometime, and tell me how you feel after several months of it. So trust me when I say, that 10 minute break your telemarketer risked enduring was a godsend to them.
Parent
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Re:Very cool! (Score:4, Interesting)
If call centers suck so bad, why do people take the jobs ? You're encouraging the abuse by enabling these bureaucratic slave drivers. I don't know of anyone who likes call centers, not as an employee, not as a victim either. The only people who like them are the so-called "clients", the ones whose products are being sold or supported, because not only is it cheap, but it also cuts maintenance costs thanks to the many people who would rather buy a new thingamajig than have to deal with retarded call center queues all afternoon.
One thing is consistent: there are always companies looking to hire, in fact many of them complain that it's so hard to find good people. I know why: they're all pissing their life away in a call center for peanuts, while the good jobs go unfilled. If you've got the social skills, patience and computer smarts to survive a call center job, those same skills could be applied in just about any other office environment for less stress and maybe even more money.
Shit, I know a lot of people sitting in cushy government jobs who barely have two brain cells to rub together. They wouldn't last a day working for a telemarketer, yet they're making four times as much money for a quarter of the effort. Full benefits, too!
Parent
Re:Very cool! (Score:4, Insightful)
Their turnover on employees is pretty damned high though. I don't know many "career telemarketers".
Parent
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I don't think *any* telemarketers are in their jobs because they *want* to be there. Sometimes you just don't have a choice - I for one do not blame someone if they choose to pester me with phone calls instead of starving.
I don't think the job market is really as sweet as you are making it out to be. For one thing, the economy goes up and down, people are unemployed constantly, and entire industries even seem to collapse occasionally. I wouldn't be surprised if some dotcommers had to make ends meet in cal
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Were there really no other possible jobs you could have done?
What you may fail to recognize is that telemarketing is a slave driving business. The people on the phone, we didn't make squat off the sales.
Any employer will try and pay its employees the least it possibly can. This is even the case with businesses in the "grey" or "black" economy.
The reason "telemarketing" along with "door to door" se
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How is the person being called ment to know who this company is? Giving the name, address and telephone number of the company concerned may not be part of the caller's script; they may have been trained to give misleading information and it's very unlikely that they will know the executives home phone numbers for either their own comapny or a "client".
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Re:Very cool! (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
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Re:Very cool! (Score:5, Funny)
An alternative would be to do the same thing, but in a language the caller is not expecting and hopefully dosn't understand. Possibly one of the few situations where it can be an advantage to know Klingon.
Parent
Re:Very cool! (Score:5, Insightful)
But really now this is the most reasonable way to handle the situation if you don't want to be called back because management doesn't seem to understand the concept of "No thank you, I'm not interested.".
I've worked with telemarketers, and the stuff people do to them is rather crazy. It's not the grunts you want to bitch at, complain to the heads of the company.
Parent
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Considering "crazy stuff" is done to telemarketers, presumably moreso than other industries, we have to assume there's something fundmentally wrong with telemarketing and *all* those involved, not just the heads of the company. I mean the average person being called never speaks to the head of a company -- they speak to a telemarketer on the front line. Telemarketing takes a special type of person.
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Sure I do. Not because I mean them ill-will, but because the more miserable I can make the job, (a) the higher turnover will be (thus causing problems for the management because of the effort required to hire new people and the lost productivity due to training and ramp-up time) and (b) the more money people demand in order to do it (thus causing
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So all telemarketers will transfer you to a director if you ask or give you a list of names and direct (including home) numbers if they cannot transfer the call there and then?
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Normally I say "Take me off your call list". This usually works. However there is one that I still get which is an automated call and if you don't say you are interested, it will hang up. Next time, I may hit 1 as I am interested... in getting off their call list.
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This man lives to his name (Score:2)
Re:This man lives to his name (Score:5, Interesting)
All this does is send an e-mail on your behalf to various organizations asking that you be placed on their internal do-not-call-list. By-law any company in Canada that engages in telemarketing must remove you from their call list when requested.
The ironic part is that the system actually sends out bulk e-mail in order to operate. Whether or not that is "SPAM" is open to interpretation.
Parent
Re:This man lives to his name (Score:4, Interesting)
Calling somebody should be considered consent so far as one is contacting the individual to opt out or inform them of the mistake. If the system only does that and stops after the notification is made then it isn't spam.
The only tricky part is setting things up so that it isn't ripe for abuse. And ensuring that the system won't continuously churn out emails for requests that have already been completed.
http://www.catalogchoice.org/ [catalogchoice.org] is a similar idea applied to catalogs. The site just sends opt outs, and in some cases opt ins when the person wants a new catalog, and they send a request to the business to stop sending more. The basic way that it's set up makes it advantageous for both sides.
You have to give them your address and the name on the mailing, but it's just information which is already publicly available to the company to get the correct mailing stopped.
Parent
Re:This man lives to his name (Score:5, Funny)
(x) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. your idea will not work. here is why it won't work. (one or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
(x) spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) no one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) it is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) it will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) users of email will not put up with it
( ) microsoft will not put up with it
( ) the police will not put up with it
(x) requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) laws expressly prohibiting it
(x) lack of centrally controlling authority for email
(x) open relays in foreign countries
( ) ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(x) asshats
( ) jurisdictional problems
( ) unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) huge existing software investment in smtp
( ) susceptibility of protocols other than smtp to attack
( ) willingness of users to install os patches received by email
(x) armies of worm riddled broadband-connected windows boxes
( ) eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(x) extreme profitability of spam
( ) joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) technically illiterate politicians
( ) extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) outlook
(x) botnets
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( ) ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
(x) any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) smtp headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) blacklists suck
( ) whitelists suck
( ) we should be able to talk about viagra without being censored
( ) countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) sending email should be free
( ) why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) incompatibility with open source or open source licenses
( ) feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) i don't want the government reading my email
( ) killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
furthermore, this is what i think about you:
(x) sorry dude, but i don't think it would work.
( ) this is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) nice try, assh0le! i'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
Parent
Do not call (Score:3, Insightful)
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It's even less "secure" than the number of digits might lead people to expect. Certain combinations of numbers are always invalid according to the numbering plan, others will always lead to places the telemarketing company certainly does not want to call and lists of allocated and unallocated numbers (which are likely to be in groups of something like 10,000) are h
Farming (Score:5, Insightful)
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Sad (Score:2)
This article too (Score:2)
Don't cross the streams... (Score:5, Funny)
Geistbusters!
how to deal with telemarketers (Score:2, Interesting)
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Presumably you don't live anywhere near Wales
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How about just a simple, "No thanks," and hang up? (Score:2)
I used to work myself into a froth over these calls until I realized it's just a phone call.
Re:How about just a simple, "No thanks," and hang (Score:2)
What's wrong with getting yourself added to their internal do not call list? What's wrong with a convenient service that adds you to all of them at once?
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Now, my grandmother, she comes from a different era, when hanging up on someone who's talking to you is something you didn't do. She's also characteristic of the demographic who tend to believe things nice people on the phone tell them. In other words, precisely the demographic scummy telemarketers are after.
Personally, I think the worl
Re:How about just a simple, "No thanks," and hang (Score:2)
Comments like this really need an "irony" tag. An alternative POV would be "My phone my rules. If you don't like the results of calling me then don't do it."
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Do all the calls you get originate in the US? Nothing much to stop the operators being in another NANP country. Let alone the possibility that they might be anywhere on the planet and using a VoIP service which provides them with outgoing only telephone numbers which are in the same country as number being called. In which case unless a regulator had the right powers they will end up playing "whack a mole".
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Also where this is done properly consent for a company to call you for one purpose does not imply consent for any other purposes. e.g. if you give them a number for a company to contact you about the delivery of goods they can't the