a_cubed | Cold Caller Baiting: A New Game

Despite being registered with the Telephone Preference Service (http://www.tpsonline.org.uk/) I'm still receiving cold sales calls. As you will know if you receive them many of these are either entirely "dead calls" or start out with a "dead period" while the computer that is making the call either identifies an operator free to take the call or decides that it s a person and not an answering service. Now, there's not much that can be done about the "dead calls" but I find that the "dead periods" are a dead giveaway (pardon the pun) that this is a cold sales call. Note that this is a completely dead line with no "background noise" so it's entirely possible to distinguish between this "dead period" and an ordinary caller who has been distracted or is using a speaker-phone and has to pick up the handset.

In keeping with the concept os spam-baiters, I'm fighting back in a small way against these calls. When it's obvious that's what I'm getting I don't hang up, as I used to, nor do I respond telling them I'm registered on the TPS, as I used to. Instead I just let them continue saying "hello....hello...Anybody there" for the ten seconds or so it takes them to give up. The benefits of this are:

1) It annoys the operator in the same way the dead period and dead calls irritate me.

2) It costs the calling company money.

Now some might say that doing 1 is unfair because they're just people making a living. Well, so was Eichmann, but that didn't stop him being executed. Besides, doing this reduces the stress I get from these calls (OK, you can call me petty if you like, but it helps). There are plenty of call centre jobs out there that don't do this sort of cold calling, so they should find one of those instead of working in an evil way.

You don't even have to sit there and listen - you can just put the handset down and go back to whatever it is you were doing and put the handset back once they've gone away.