Tuesday, June 21, 2005

Grumble #5

Yesterday I received seven 'cold' calls from telemarketers in a space of three hours. I lost patience when the seventh call came in, I shouted: "I am not fucking interested in any new 3G mobile phones, insurance or whatever you are selling today. I don't even own a car. Now piss off and don't call back!" I am not proud of it.

I am not sure if such a thing is practiced in Malaysia so I will give a short explanation on how telemarketers operate here: Cold calls are automatically generated by computers and if you answer the phone there would be one or two seconds of silent before the call is transferred to a n available telemarketer.


With Caller ID activated, the phone would display the number as 'unknown' or 'witheld'. Normally you would think that it is wise to ignore calls that have no numbers but with many people switching over to 3rd party recaller systems such as One.tel, genuine callers (like my aunt, the bank or even the police) in recent times would have my Caller ID function display 'unknown' or 'witheld'.

Which meant that I would usually have to take almost every calls made to my phone. I once ignored a call twice assuming it was being made by a telemarketer but it was made by a made through his company's switchboard. Man was he pissed.

3 comments:

Kat said...

The cold calls are getting annoying. I heard that the telemarketing firm might not be able to withhold their numbers now. Hopefully that will happen soon. I don't think my dad is pleased with us ignoring the phone calls all the time, thinking that it's just another call from telemarketers.

living-in-the-uk said...

lol i got that call today . they just won't stop talking. i said i wasnt interested. he said okays. then he called back about 30secs later.
total call time was about 15 mins.

Jon Choo said...

living-in-the-uk (I wish you would leave your name), just be rude to them and slam the phone down. They would not listen.

kat, hopefully OFCOM will come down hard on these people. But I suspect many will move operations to their overseas call centre to escape jurisdiction.