OK, at serious risk to my social life (such as it is), I'm going to admit to the fact that I am one of the most annoying people in the world. I'm a telemarketer for an insurance company in South Bend, IN. I know that most people hate it when I call (they complain about it often), but I've got a bone to pick with some people, myself.
I understand that no one wants to be called during dinner time and, frankly, I don't want to call you then, either, but no one can deny that the hours of five to seven are when most people are home from work, so it stands to reason that that would be when telemarketers would call. If you do not want to be called, then you need to take five minutes out of your day to add your phone number to the National Do Not Call Registry. I did that just last night and all it takes is a working e-mail address, which you can get for free from Yahoo!, first assuming that you are one of the few people nowadays without one. It took, literally, five minutes. And here's another thing. Before you yell at your friendly neighborhood telemarketer about the fact that your number is on the DNC list, think for a second about when you registered. Apparently, most people are still unaware that your number is knocked off the list after five years. You have to take another five minutes out of your life to re-register every 1, 825 days. Cruel and unusual, I know. And, so you know, most, if not all, of us do check the registry before we call. I know I do. Manually. I key in each number, a long, tedious process, to ensure that I do not call someone on the DNC list. It's in our best interest to do so. So stop complaining. If you don't want to register with the list, simply politely ask to be removed from the calling list of whatever business is calling you. It's a request that is also in that business's best interest to honor.
Also, you need to remember that telemarketers are people, too, just like you. Imagine, for a moment, that, in the course of doing your job, you had to call someone you did not know and they cursed and yelled and threw a fit about how they already told someone, somewhere, at sometime in the past that they did not want to be called, then hung up. How would you react? Honestly, people, have we, as a society, lost our ability to be polite? Just because people don't like what we do doesn't make us subhuman. A simple "Thanks, we're/I'm not interested" will suffice, and will often result in a more polite response from us. We're not bottom-feeders. We're just people glad to have a job, and I think I can safely say, that if you were unemployed and looking for a job and you were able to get a job as a telemarketer, you would take it. Especially in this economy.
So in short, I know I'm annoying, but there's aspects of you that annoy people, too, and, considering how easy it is to keep from being annoyed by us, you need to quit whining. And, maybe, if you can bring yourself to keep it in mind, at least act like telemarketers are people, too.
