Pearls Before Swine by Stephan Pastis for December 09, 2012

It’s payback time!

My roommate’s schtick is to ask the telemarketer for their phone number so that she can call them back.

@Bilan. When I worked as a telemarketer and one would ask for my home number I always gave it out. I then reminded them that I wouldn’t get off work until 11PM EST and it was usually @ 11:30PM by the time I got home. I needed a few minutes to get supper started so they really should call me after midnight. No one ever called.

Put snuffles on it, Rat.

I am so stealing this and doing it myself next time I get a call.

Automated-response phone trees are why I don’t respond to the annoying calls that ignore the “do not call” regulations—at least not in the way they would want….

Right on!

Now say something like: If you are going to bill me, make sure to include the following number on the bill: 8264519035417835230637694417408769925193582533702541698982463317002622183769342. And charge them $100 to repeat the number …

That’s something you just want to do to some of the folks that call. Especially banks and credit card companies you don’t have an account with but who insist you’re late on your payments to them. Me, I’d just like to be prepared with a sound effects CD cued to a crowded place then pick up the phone and act like it’s a pizza joint in the middle of the busy hours. Then start taking an order while their trying to run through their spiel. But I never have one ready for them and their either a recording or they sound like their from India.

When a telemarketer calls and asks for “X” — all one needs to do is say “just a moment, I’ll go get him (or her).” Then set down the phone. And leave it. The telemarketer will wait a fairly long time before hanging up, realizing that nobody is coming to the phone. Meanwhile, they aren’t annoying anyone else.

No one can have fun while navigating through a telephone menu, except maybe that dumb Pig.

Who hasn’t wanted to do this?

This just become my favourite Pearls strip.

Love the idea. F6F5Hellcat needs to go back for classes and learn the difference between “their” and “they’re”

15 months ago I moved and had to change my phone number I had for 25 years.My new number belonged to someone who owed money.I still get ROBOCALLS that say if you are not Kim ******** please disconnect, but I stay on and tell those worthless idiots where to go.

When I look at the caller ID and see a number I don’t recognize, especially 800 numbers, I pick up the phone and immediately say, “Hello, is Dave there?” If it’s a recording, I hang up. If it’s a real telemarketer, they get very confused about who called whom. When they splutter, then I tell them I must have a wrong number, and hang up.

@ Alexikakos: That’s probably the police dept GOAL: To get you to NOT call them back again!

I have no patience at all for those robot receptions. I just hit ZERO immediately every time to try to get to someone correct. If that doesn’t work then I hit 111111111 and get to someone who I then tell what I want. They usually tell me that it’s not their department, and I tell them that I just hit the 1 because the 0 didn’t work and I wasn’t going to sit there for 30 minutes listening to a bunch of useless sentences.

I got a call once from a telemarketer peddling some allegedly money-saving offer. If someone told him they weren’t interested, his tactic was to ask, “You mean you’re not interested in saving money?” Theoretically no one could have the nerve to say they weren’t interested in that, but I did. He blew his top. He spluttered, “Well…that’s your problem!” and hung up on me. Hehe.

Haha, Excellent!

I hate recorded phone calls.

xxx

Hello, this is Rachel at card services.

GO TO YOUTUBE —search for “Telemarketer Prank Tom Mabe”the first one that comes up, claiming to be “best”, is an absolute must listen.I would not steer you guys wrong, go do it, you’ll love it!

bank of america…really bad bank. if they call, play nyan cat on an endless loop. maybe, we should foreclose on their branches.

Oh, you poor people, having your lives interrupted for a few minutes by someone who is only trying to put food on the table and keep a roof over his/her family’s head. Boo hoo. My heart totally bleeds for you

Yeah, in case you all missed it, that was sarcasm. You cutesy pranksters get no sympathy from me. Zero. None. Zilch. It’s because of your cutesy tricks that I kept getting fired from my telemarketing jobs (which I hated but had to take because there was nothing else available for which I was qualified at the time) because I couldn’t make my sales quotas because none of you could ever keep an open enough mind to listen to what I had to say. I sold mail-order prescription drug service (outbound), a service that would have made your lives a lot easier, and I couldn’t take a simple "no for an answer because I was specifically trained — and required — to make two strong attempts on each call; if I didn’t, I got written up for failing to do so.

And INBOUND telemarketing (my last job before I finally was able to get back into my original career field) wasn’t much better. Sure, you called me, but silly me, I had this wild idea that you were actually calling me to buy Internet service, rather than just to waste my time asking me for “information” about the service that you could just as easily have found online before you decided to call — forgetting entirely that my job wasn’t to provide “information,” but to SIGN YOU UP FOR THE SERVICE. And by the way, when you told me that you didn’t want to commit to anything that day, but rather condescendingly told me that I was “a good little salesman” and that I had “done my job”? You couldn’t have been more insulting if you had tried. Again, my job (whether to sell you mail-order prescription drug service or Internet service) wasn’t just to provide you “information” about the service — IT WAS ACTUALLY TO GET YOU TO SIGN UP FOR SAID SERVICE.

Should’ve started with ’listen carefully as the menus have recently changed"…

I wonder if Rat was using a computer voice. Otherwise, they’d never have fallen for it….My sister once confused a telemarketer by asking him whether he owned the product he was selling. When he said no, she asked why she should be convinced to buy something when the person selling it didn’t even have it. The conversation ended there, but I’m not sure who hung up.

I think I’ll try that the next time the bank calls to bug me.

I work for a company with a call center. The head of it says most IVR based phone systems can sense rising frustration, and usually a curse word will trigger a transfer to a real person. Go for the “tamer” ones though. And f bomb probably sets the wrong tone.

My dad would just put the phone down on the table and walk away until they got ‘tired talking to themselves’. He did that because ‘it would be rude to hang up on them’.

The Rat rocks today.Calvin has a good idea, too.

A licensed plumber, I do a little work on the side. Sometimes I’ll make a little pitch to these people who call, seeing if their drains need any servicing, etc. No takers yet. There are other times I just laugh hysterically at absolutely nothing. That can be quite freeing sometimes and it sure gets rid of people.As for legaleagle48’s comments, yikes. Bitterness. It’s the telemarketer’s living to be sure but it isn’t my responsibility to help. We have very little debt and are on course to pay it all off. I’m motivated to save money, so any sales pitch is annoying at best. If I can have a little fun with the callers it becomes entertainment.

This is so hilarious. Next time I’m gonna do that!!!

If they ask for a name, I tell them he/she died this morning. If they just want a warm body, I tell them I’m changing the baby’s diaper and please wait. Sometimes they will hang on a loooong time before they hang up.

@legaleagle48 and that double hard sell is exactly why we hate what you did. Good products need good marketing and that’s vile marketing. Additionally, once you buy a single damn thing from these people, they will hound you until you die to buy more crap. I’m glad you got some money out of them.

Not true. As noted, they could be calling you because the person who had the phone number before you was the delinquent, or because they are trying to track someone of the same name, or a relative. And in some ways, those are the most frustrating: you did nothing wrong, but they won’t stop calling.

Best strip EVER