Wednesday, May 10, 2006

Push the button, get a fish head

The other day, I got a glimpse of some low tech that phone solicitors are using now. By "low" tech, here, I do not mean "low tech" in the luddite sense. I mean "low" as in, "Man, that's low."

We all know that anyone with a conscience could not work as a phone solicitor for long. Barging in on people's personal lives like a virtual Lenny and Squiggy, with the sole goal to verbally browbeat the elderly, the trusting, and the good-natured into handing over undeserved cash, is not the sort of thing a decent person does. There's a circle of hell reserved for them, sandwiched between child molesters and televangelists.

We also know that increasingly, phone drones are being told to stick to pre-written scripts handed to them when they crawl out of the sewers to earn their daily bucket of rotting fish heads. This is because the phone solicitor faces a dilemma: you don't want jerks talking to the customers, but only jerks would take the job, since these are the only people who could live with themselves for doing what they do. Thus, the script is a way to try to make jerks not sound like jerks when they're trying to make a sale.

But they must be really scraping the bottom of the humanity barrel now. I had a "conversation" with a phone solicitor drone that went something like this:
Me: "Hello?"

They: "Hi! My name is Lisa. I'm conducting a research survey for {some group}, and I was wondering if I could ask you some questions. Do you have at least one child under the age of sixteen in your household?"

Me: "Is this a sales call?"

They: (Pause) "This is not a solicitation. It is a survey we are conducting on behalf of {some group}." (Pause) "Do you have at least one child under the age of sixteen in your household?"

Me: "Can you process credit card donations for your client?"

They: (Long pause) "We can take your donation right now over the phone. If you like, I'd like to connect you to our donations department."

(At this point, I'm pretty sure this is not a real survey, but instead one of those "surveys" that are really a series of loaded questions meant to instill fear or rile you up so that you're willing to give a donation to the group sponsoring the "survey." Of course, since they're always calling from unlisted numbers, you have no way of knowing whether these yahoos who called you up have any connection at all to the sponsoring group - even if you were willing to give money to a group who harasses people at home.)

Me: "So this is a phone solicitation."

They: (Longer pause) "This is not a solicitation. It is a survey we are conducting on behalf of {some group}." (Pause) "Do you have at least one child under the age of sixteen in your household?"

Me: "You just said that. Am I speaking to a recording?"

They: (Pause) "My voice is recorded, but you have been speaking to a live person the entire time."

Me: (Annoyed) "You just said your name was Lisa. Am I speaking to Lisa?"

They: (Pause) "My voice is recorded, but you have been speaking to a live person the entire time."

Me: "I'll take that as a 'no.' In your very first sentence, you not only tried to trick me into thinking I was speaking to a live person, but you lied about who you were, and you lied about whether you were going to be asking me for money. Why should I trust you with my credit card number after that?"

They: (Pause) "This is not a solicitation. It is a survey we are conducting on behalf of {some group}." (Pause) "Do you have at least one child under the age of sixteen in your household?"

Me: "Bye, now."

Clearly, the phone solicitation industry has scraped so low to get their workers that they no longer trust their drones to even speak the lines handed to them. The gutteral gruntings, mispronounciations, and stumbling over two-syllable words just doesn't cut it with the customers, I guess. Now they just have a bunch of subhuman troglodytes chained to a wall in a dimly-lit condemned building somewhere with a bank of buttons in front of them which they punch like trained monkeys according to a flowchart. If they get someone to give up their credit card number, a little machine doles out a fish head.

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