How to get back at Telemarketers.

How to get back at Telemarketers.

by Liv | Published on May 23rd, 2008, 10:07 am | Life

Recently we've had some telemarketers who have been above average in their methodical ways of annoying us, and finally I stopped them this morning. Already, we're on the DNC (Do not Call) list, but obviously the people at Personal Period haven't figured this out. Who is Personal Period? To me it sounded like the tampon manufacturers of America calling for a product survey, but in actuality it's Publisher's Clearing House. More to the point it's the magazine people trying to sell you magazines. In my 15 years in call centers, yes I've been an outbound call center rep, but when you call my house 15 freaking times a day then my niceness turns to war and I'm going to get you back.

Luckily my phone service is with Lingo. I've had Lingo for about 3 years, and am a very satisfied customer. Lingo is a broadband based telephony service, but most all phone companies have a feature similar to their "Advanced Call Forwarding." For most people it goes unused, but for me I love it. I pull up the call control online and then simply enter their telephone number both into the incoming call number and the outgoing call number. The basic premise is without effecting any other calls, when this telemarketer calls (and it's always the same number) it forwards the call to another number. It does this without me ever knowing... (although I'd love to hear the telemarketers remarks when they keep calling and getting another rep at the call center.) The kicker is I'm forwarding them to their own call center. So every time they call they pay for their call, and the chaos that ensues.

I call it sweet revenge. Don't mess with me Personal Period.

There is a fellow here where I work, who is the administrator for our web QA software. He has spooky powers. One of the tools we use is web site load testing. One day, he got a huge load of emails from some company wanting to sell him on their product. He started off politely telling them he wasn't interested, but they persisted.

Things escalated for a few days, until he finally informed them that he had access to a license for this load testing software, and he had the URL for their web site. The implication -- that he would set up a load test to simulate 500 concurrent users accessing their site for 6 hours or so, thereby overloading their servers -- was enough to get them to go looking for sales elsewhere.

You can also forward calls to The Rejection Hotline - http://www.rejectionhotline.com/

that's actually quite good. One time I got in a fight with my mother-in-law, and didn't want to talk to her so I forwarded her calls for a week to the DEA.

It was quite amusing....