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August 21, 2002
Saratoga, California Since 1955 |
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Point of View
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Standing up to the enemy—those phone
solicitors
By Carl Heintze
These days we live in a house besieged. The
enemies aren't visible—they are auditory.
Daily, nightly, they assault our ears.
The battle used to begin about the time we
sat down to eat our supper. But now it seems
to start earlier, sometimes in the early
afternoons.
It's worse on weekends.
That's because they know we're home and they
have been lying in wait.
I'm talking about telephone solicitors.
There are droves of them, and they seem to
come in waves.
For awhile it was window replacement salesmen
who wanted us to replace our old and
inefficient windows with double-paned glass
to the tune of $10,000 or so.
For awhile it was the charitable efforts of
law enforcement officers who were aiding the
unfortunate young with projects of various
sorts. Then there were magazines that offered
us great deals on subscriptions.
Lately it has been mortgage lenders who want
to lend us money on or for our houses, even
those paid off years ago.
"Rates have never been lower," they manage to
gasp before I hang up on them.
The calls come around suppertime because they
know it is a good bet we are home then. The
same is true of weekends, particularly
Saturday mornings.
But there is really no other rhyme or reason
to them. The calls can come at any time. We
had one a couple of nights ago at 9 p.m.
The most aggravating, of course, are the
calls that aren't calls. You pick up the
telephone and say hello and no one answers.
I've heard various explanations for this, the
most logical being that this call is made in
advance to be sure you're home. A second
soliciting call comes later. Sometimes the
caller starts his or her spiel after a brief
pause, but more often than not there is
simply no one there.
The other sure sign that it's a solicitation
call is the caller's ability to mispronounce
my name. It is not an easy name to pronounce
correctly and so when I hear one of several
variations I know it is a telephone
solicitor.
This allows me a certain amount of time in
which to snarl a denial and hang up. I know
this is impolite and hostile, but I find I am
particularly put off by those solicitors who
say gaily, "And how are you tonight, Mr.
Heintizy?" To which I reply something like,
"I was fine until you called."
I know that the caller isn't really
responsible for the jolly approach, that they
are just trying to eke out a meager living in
some bucket shop somewhere. But somehow it
just grates on my soul to have my privacy
invaded by a stranger trying to sell me
something I don't want at a time when I don't
want to talk.
I've often wondered what the percentage of
returns is for the effort expended. It can't
be very great, but there must be some
profit—otherwise they wouldn't bother.
And I know repeats are necessary. This week,
for instance, I got four calls from a roofing
company even though I told each caller
vehemently I was not interested in a new
roof. Apparently you have to not only be
persistent to be a solicitor, but also pretty
thick-skinned.
But the worst multiple offender used to be a
telephone company that shall remain nameless.
(Why should I give them a free plug in the
paper?)
I'm told—although I don't know it for
sure—that their callers were required to try
each number seven times before giving up. It
seemed more like 70.
I know there are ways to get around the
barrage of calls. None of them, however, are
easy. The easiest is to install an answering
machine and let it screen the calls. This
discourages a lot of callers. They hang up
without another word when they hear your
"Sorry you couldn't reach us ... " It
discourages some, but not all. There are
still some who blather on with their message
in spite of your not being there. Later, you
have to hear at least some of the message
before you erase it from your machine.
And supposedly you can call and tell the
callers—provided you can ever find out where
they are—to stop it. But that takes more
trouble than it is worth.
So there really is no simple solution to
telephone solicitations. Like spam in your
email account, like junk mail, like
billboards and commercials on television and
radio, it just seems to be a part of the
American way.
But somehow it also seems particularly
American to value one's privacy. I've always
thought that since I am paying for the use of
the telephone, I ought to have some control
over what it's used for—although I must
admit that when my children were teenagers
that wasn't much.
The control we exert over the telephone these
days is to hang up—and I do. But, alas, I
have on occasion hung up on friends who I
thought were solicitors, an act not likely to
keep them friends for long. So now I am more
judicious. I alternate by letting the machine
answer and just hanging up when they
mispronounce my name.
That makes it about an equal contest. But I'd
rather not have to defend my home at all.
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