Dinhternet

Got too much free time on your hands?

Clay­ton for­warded this e-mail to me the other day… usu­ally I don’t like for­warded mass mails, but this one is entertaining…

Andy Rooney’s Tips for Han­dling Telemarketers

Three Lit­tle Words That Work !!

(1)The three lit­tle words are: “Hold On, Please…”

Say­ing this, while putting down your phone and walk­ing off (instead of hanging-up imme­di­ately) would make each tele­mar­ket­ing call so much more time-consuming that boiler room sales would grind to a halt. Then when you even­tu­ally hear the phone company’s “beep-beep-beep” tone, you know it’s time to go back and hang up your hand­set, which has effi­ciently com­pleted its task. These three lit­tle words will help elim­i­nate tele­phone soliciting.

(2) Do you ever get those annoy­ing phone calls with no one on the other end?

This is a tele­mar­ket­ing tech­nique where a machine makes phone calls and records the time of day when a per­son answers the phone. This tech­nique is used to deter­mine the best time of day for a “real” sales per­son to call back and get some­one at home. What you can do after answer­ing, if you notice there is no one there, is to imme­di­ately start hit­ting your # but­ton on the phone, 6 or 7 times, as quickly as pos­si­ble This con­fuses the machine that dialed the call and it kicks your num­ber out of their sys­tem. Gosh, what a shame not to have your name in their sys­tem any longer!

(3) Junk Mail Help:

When you get “ads” enclosed with your phone or util­ity bill, return these “ads” with your pay­ment. Let the send­ing com­pa­nies throw their own junk mail away. When you get those “pre-approved” let­ters in the mail for every­thing from credit cards to 2nd mort­gages and sim­i­lar type junk, do not throw away the return enve­lope. Most of these come with postage-paid return envelopes, right? It costs them more than the reg­u­lar 41 cents postage “IF” and when they receive them back. It costs them noth­ing if you throw them away! The postage was 39 cents before the last increase and it is accord­ing to the weight. In that case, why not get rid of some of your other junk mail and put it in these cool lit­tle, postage-paid return envelopes.

One of Andy Rooney’s (60 min­utes) ideas.

Send an ad for your local chim­ney cleaner to Amer­i­can Express. Send a pizza coupon to Citibank. If you didn’t get any­thing else that day, then just send them their blank appli­ca­tion back! If you want to remain anony­mous, just make sure your name isn’t on any­thing you send them. You can even send the enve­lope back empty if you want to just to keep them guess­ing! It still costs them 41 cents. The banks and credit card com­pa­nies are cur­rently get­ting a lot of their own junk back in the mail, but folks, we need to OVERWHELM them. Let’s let them know what it’s like to get lots of junk mail, and best of all they’re pay­ing for it… Twice! Let’s help keep our postal ser­vice busy since they are say­ing that e-mail is cut­ting into their busi­ness prof­its, and that’s why they need to increase postage costs again. You get the idea!

If enough peo­ple fol­low these tips, it will work —- I have been doing this for years, and I get very lit­tle junk mail anymore.

I like the ease of the Rooney tip, but still think the counter-script is much more fun.