The Chronicles Of…

A lot of people hate them, but if I have the time I don’t mind a chat with a telemarketer although I wouldn’t ever buy anything from one.

Sometimes I like to lead them on a little, but my favourite game of all is playing the I’m really having difficult understanding what you are saying. I’ll usually pick a certain thing they say, the more unimportant the piece of information the better, and just ask them to repeat it, or ask them lots of questions about it, or pretend you just don’t get it, they’ll try to move on but I don’t let them.

But my newest, and most favourite game to date, is to see how quickly you can get them to hang up on me. I have rules though, I can’t attack them, can’t abuse them, can’t be angry or anything, but just have to be reasonably polite.

So basically I play the I don’t understand you card until they get frustrated and hang up, but I don’t say that I can’t understand them but rather be polite and ask them to repeat themselves or explain it better, or repeat the word/phrase incorrectly back to them and ask if that’s what they said.

I didn’t think it was all that possible to get them to hang up on me, but it seems it is, yesterday I had one indian lady who called and her opening line was ‘Hi I’m calling from VIP Tel’ or something like that, now it took me most the conversation to work out she said VIP Tel, I though she was saying wepatel or something. Anyway I was able to get her to hang up in 2 minutes 20 seconds and the whole conversation was me repeating what I thought she said the company name was and her trying to correct me and say what it really was. At one point she tried to just move on, but I wanted to know the company name, so she didn’t get pass me trying to understand the company name before she gave up and hung up.

So 2mins 20sec is my current record.