Given that I telecommute and my wife has her own business, we have a lot of phone lines. In fact, in order to manage them all, I had to purchase a PBX box, though now it seems that you can home-brew your own solution using a PC and Asterisk, a full-featured open source PBX software package.
Anyhow, lots of phone lines means lots of telemarketing calls. And, while we’ve registered with the National Do Not Call List, it seems that some telemarketers disregard this. Unfortunately, the law has a couple of loop holes. First of all charities, political organizations, and telephone surveyors are exempt, as are companies you’ve done business with.
About every other day, we get a call from the caller id of Alabama, and it’s always the same thing. Would we give money to the police, to needy children, to needy police, to needy children needing policing, and so forth. It’s getting old, and it’s getting very, very annoying. I don’t think I should have to install call block just because a single company wants to harass us for handouts.
The script is pretty much the same, “thank you for your previous support, can we count on you again this year?” Your gut instinct is to think that if you gave before, then you already worked through the thought process, and you might as well give again.
This time rather than hanging up, I asked to talk to the supervisor; which, legally, they’re required to do, but many will just hang up on you. It always helps if you can come up with a question the guy at the phone can’t answer. I asked what organization was calling, and he told me the cause he was dialing for, and I said that no, I wanted the organization name of the call center. Poof, supervisor.
Once I had him, I asked three questions. One, “why is it you guys say I gave, because I know I didn’t — has someone stolen my credit card and I should investigate fraud, or is this just a script?” His answer was that no, they don’t take cedit cards, they mail directly to the house and ask for a check with for deposit only written on it. And, that yes, sometime in the past I gave to one of their organizations.
He clarified that they call for a number of programs, and that if you give once, you’re tagged as a giver, and they hit you up for all programs. Ah ha!
Turns out nearly 10 years ago, we did give once, when we thought it was the local police department calling. We later learned that it was an organization that had gotten the classification of charity, because they donated 1% of profits to the police. The rest was kept as overhead. Very slimey. Even the police themselves say not to us them. As such, I don’t donate anymore unless it’s a cause that has direct meaning to me or impacts my local community, no matter what sob story they tell or heart strings they try to pluck. Even so, I’ve also started looking at how organizations behave, between the paid cop who sets up a speed trap on an empty road to meet a quota to fill state coffers versus the unpaid volunteer firefighter who’s given up family time to rush into a burning building risking personal injury to save an unknown person, I know where my extra dollars will go. If I felt safer, saw less evidence of gang activity, or read that meth-houses were being shutdown, I’d whole heartedly alter the priorities.
Anyhow, I next asked what the call center was, and he identified them as Dytel. A quick search on the web shows that Dytel makes autodialer equipment, so there has to be a little more to the story. And so there is, check out this article. Things sounding familiar?
Finally I asked the guy if there was a way that I could be put on a permanent Do Not Call list, and ideally removed from the database. That I had no intention of ever giving in the future, and that their repeated calls to me were just going to jack up their overhead and be less effecting at target marketing. And, eventually, the supervisor said he would remove me from the list.
We’ll see, as the article above points out, that often does little good. However, the article points out that the next stop should be to Secretary of State the next time the phone rings and says it’s from Alabama and a telemarketer begins a pitch.