COMMENTARY: Telemarketers are not nice people...

James C. Johnston Jr.

How many times a day does your phone ring? How often to you rush to that self-same phone to see what has happened in your world only to discover that some jerk wants to sell you something you do not need, or want, or that interests you. How much of your time is irretrievably lost to these telephone vampires who seem to scheme to make your life miserable? “Too much time” is the answer.
When I get a live person on the phone, who is engaged in the business of tormenting me and wasting my precious time, a person frequently with a very Western sounding name like Ralph or Brian and a Southeast-Asian accent and with a phone identified number indicating a person who might be a neighbor, friend, or serious party living at residential address to complete the obvious subterfuge, I frequently discover that that phony use of a telephone number was employed to lull me into a feeling of false security as I answered my phone believing that something of consequence was to be disclosed. But alas, that is not the case. I am only confronted with a cheesy salesman who wants to sell me solar panels or some service I do not want.
After a dozen or so of these “phone-calls”, taking me away from domestic duties or creative work, I really want to commit a nice juicy murder upon the body of the person who is annoying me by using my own indispensable telephone against me. By now, I am in a blind fury. Then at this moment of maximum annoyance, some other jerk calls me informing me that I am being investigated by the I.R.S. or the F.B.I. for some serious infraction of the law.
This is when I explode telling the person on the other end of the line that they are full of horse excrement, that these legitimate agencies don’t operate on the phone this way and that I hope that when they are captured, tried, found guilty, and sent to jail that they meet some nice people in prison who want a very nice and up-close-intimate personal relationship with them for the time of their confinement.
I then tell them that they will be going to jail for committing a real crime in ultimately conning some poor soul out of their small savings by scaring them to death. These jerks hang up quickly, and I generally do not hear from them again for a long time.
Then you might get the creeps calling you who try to get all sorts of highly personal information from you about your banking and other fiscal matters. One of my early bizarre calls was purportedly from the “Nigerian Government”. This fellow called me to inform me that one of my long-lost relatives, my cousin Fred, had died in a terrible automobile accident along with his whole immediate family! And surprise-surprise, because of my familiar proximity to him, I have become a secondary heir to his multi-million dollar Nigerian estate.
Now all this bank official in Lagos needed to make my new fortune secure was to acquire all of my intimate banking information so that he could transfer the millions of dollars of dear old Fred’s wealth into my bank account. Instead of blowing-up at him for insulting my intelligence, I switched to my sweetest-self-persona, and told him how very close my cousin Fred had been to me when we were kids. I told this “Official” just how much Fred, the perennial idealist, loved the people of Nigeria, and just how sorry Fred felt for the children of that poor and impoverished country. I then went on to say whereas I myself was very wealthy, I did not need Fred’s treasure and that I was very sure that his millions would be much better used to enrich the schooling experience of the children of his beloved adopted country of beautiful Nigeria.
The so-called official at the other end of the line, who may very well had been calling from outside of the country, just didn’t know what to do when confronted by my overwhelming generosity. He became so profoundly frustrated and perplexed beyond belief that he entered a state of near apoplexy. I told him to use Fred’s wealth to build some schools and name them after my dear cousin Fred and his deceased family members, and to please not thank me for my assumed largess, because I knew that what I so generously proposed doing was just what Fred would have wanted if he had just taken the time to think things out to their logical conclusion while he was still alive and living happily in Nigeria. Then I asked the “Official” for his name and contact information. At this point his receiver crashed down. His frustration made me smile for days.
I stopped using my vast and varied purple vocabulary on these creeps, except for special occasions, and I decided instead to torment these invaders of my space and privacy whenever I could. You can safely assume that these callers are all potentially thieves and con-artists. They mostly target old people, the weak-minded, and most of all, they target the greedy and the stupid cooked-minded folks who don’t mind breaking the law to get rich quick. The old expression, “You can’t cheat an honest man,” is quite true. It’s the people willing to be dishonest who can be suckered into some stupid scheme to shelter money for some crook in return for a big share of the loot.
It is a good basic rule never to give out any personal information about your: finances, Social Security Number, Credit Card Number, Bank Account Numbers, Insurance information, Personal References, and Referrals for a supposed cash reward, and never use the word “yes” with these folks, because with today’s technology you can be edited to make it sound as if you have agreed to all sorts of fiscally damaging things.
A century or so ago, my baby sister was talked into buying a whole bunch of magazines she had no need of or desire to receive by a handsome young guy “Working his way through college.” Then after the obscenely big sale was done, she was hounded for payment for months thereafter with all sorts of dire threats made against her if she didn’t pay-up. She was just a kid in her teens and afraid of dire consequences as a result of her rash economic behavior. One day, when she got one of those threatening calls, I happened to be in the room where the call was received. She turned to me in a kind of terror and just blurted out the whole story to me in a rush of blind fear in less than half a minute. She covered the receiver of the telephone, because, as I stated, the creeps in question were calling her with threats of dire legal action, and she didn’t want them to know that she was at home.
I took the phone from her and bellowed into it, “Who the Hell is this!”
The voice on the other end responded, “This is Tom Jenkins at the Maxwell Publishing Company [not the real names if you were wondering] and a Miss So-In-So has ordered these magazines and has not paid for them and we are going…”
“You jerks!” I bellowed at the caller. “Do you know who you were just speaking to! My mother! My sister was killed in an automobile accident last night, and now you are using her death in some phony scheme just to shake us down for some cash just by using her name! I wonder what my friend the State Attorney General will have to say about this. You ghouls ought to be ashamed of yourselves for trying to make a buck over my sister’s dead body!”
Needless to say my sister was standing there in utter disbelief both with my realism and outraged ferocity. Then she covered her mouth to stifle the sound of her laughter of relief as a response to the really bizarre situation I seem to be using in resolving her issue in a very affirmative way. “You creeps make me sick! What do you guys do? Read the obituaries and get your phone calls ready for the day!”
By now, I was having a very good time playing the totally outraged and bereaved big brother. When I paused to take in some air, I heard, “Oh please sir! We had no idea. Please forget the whole matter. We are really sorry for your loss!’’ said the horrified voice at the other end of the line. This was really making me feel very good. It is still a very good memory even almost sixty years later.
When I was a kid, the telephone was always a fun place to play if you were bored. My aunts, some eighty or almost ninety years ago, would enjoy listening-in on the party-lines shared by people living in a locality when their soap operas failed to amuse them. If you had a “Private Number” this was a much more expensive proposition in “The Old Days”. So, most folks shared a party line. The bad part of sharing a party line was that only one person at a time could use it. So, if Mrs. Jones wanted to call Mrs. Brown with the news of the day, she would have to wait until recently divorced Mrs. Hazelnut was through talking to her new friend, Henry Hooligan, who clearly and frequently was usually up to no good!
After about fifteen minutes, you might hear, “You have been on the line about an hour Dearie,” wailed a distraught Mrs. Jones at Mrs. Hazelnut. “Don’cha think it might be nice to give somebody else a turn using the line?”
You can see just how this building conflict and resulting explosion of outrage and fury between the two women was going to work itself out as pure entertainment and general and delightful distraction. And I am sure that you can see how kids might like to listen in to party-line conversations, as much as the house-bound ladies, as a dreadfully-slow-day-recreation. Not a few adults liked this recreational sport, and of course the reality of getting caught as the result of an involuntary gasp of surprise at some really juicy over-heard revelation, added to the excitement and a real sense of danger to the whole sordid enterprise. Pardon the digression, but wasn’t this bit of social history fun!
Something that kids liked to do, to show just how original and clever they were, was to use some stupid old joke that seemed to have worked for years. They would call a store that sold tobacco and say to the proprietor, “Have you got Prince Albert[ a popular pipe tobacco] in a can?”
The shop owner would reply in the affirmative, and the kid would then yell into the phone, “Then let him out you fool!”
Getting back to the awful reality of today’s telemarketer-low-lives, you have my permission to hate them for the awful pests that they are. If you get some live ones on the phone, please feel free to torment the living Hell out of them. After all, they asked for it. Even better ask them for their home phone numbers so that, you can get back to them at a more convenient hour like two o’clock in the morning when you are not quite so busy! I really don’t think telemarketers are very nice people!