Jameela Siddiqi
Never the mind that sheer excitement of an e-mail actually dropping into one’s In Box in the early 1990s, (when SPAM was just a wartime meat memory—minus the horse flesh), I’m even old enough to remember when the “tring-tring” of the telephone bell would set my heart racing with fevered anticipation. Am I the only person on this God’s earth who is at a loss to explain how such an exciting sound has now turned into one of the most dreaded nuisances of the present age?
Apart from being an absolute pain in the proverbial, the so-called “marketing-call”, has also got to be the 21st century’s greatest misnomer because everybody knows that this is not the way to sell something to someone who is in the midst of cooking dinner and, at this moment in time, new patio doors are not as much a priority as making sure the onions don’t burn.
These unwanted calls are the least intelligent of all sales tactics known to mankind because an smart marketing strategy would entail softly bombarding you with sublimely suggestive messages whilst you were captive, bored and unable to just walk away, i.e., whilst sitting on a train or bus, or even standing at a bus stop, or tired and restless in an interminable supermarket queue. In such a situation, surely one would be glad of the slightest diversion?
Come to think of it, these days, any kind of phone call—unless it’s a matter of life or death—is an unmitigated nuisance. It’s so much more polite to send an e-mail or even a text message because those do not elicit an instant, on-the-spot response, whereas a phone call seems to say, “I am here, I have the time, so you’d better also have the time to talk to me, right now, this minute.”
When such intrusions are unwelcome, even from a close friend, (or a long-lost one), how on earth can cold-callers imagine that they will be greeted with nothing short of sheer delight while their wares (life insurance, identity-theft protection, mobile-phone contract, state-of-the-art kitchen/bathroom or a pre-paid funeral plan for the over 50’s) are items you just can’t wait to get your hands on?
Some callers start with, “How are you today…?” followed by your title and last name.
The answer to that is: “What business is that of yours?”
Of course, the experts at combating cold calls recommend that you should just hang up and don’t even dream of answering any of their questions or engaging with them at any level. But sometimes, as I found recently, their opening gambits are irresistable.
“How would you like £350,000 in cash upon your death?” asks the cold caller.
“What good is that to me when I’m dead?” I challenge him, continuing, “And, in any case, I hear God accepts all major credit cards.”
“Your loved ones would be well looked after,” he answers, as per his script, ignoring my waspish sense of humour.
“Why should anyone benefit from my death? Wouldn’t that make an excellent motive for murder?” I retort.
He hasn’t got anything on his script to deal with this question so he resorts to wanting to read out the detailed terms and conditions of the policy and I find myself unable to hang up—not because the policy interests me in the least but because I’m absolutely intrigued by the sentence construction and the interminable, unpunctuated, garbage that pours forth. I wait for the end of the sentence and it comes some four and a half minutes later concluding with, “So how do you feel about that, Dr. Siddiqi?”
“I’m over the moon,” I reply. “I’ve finally found the world’s worst, most atrociously constructed sentence. I collect such things, you know?”
The poor guy is at a complete loss for words but manages a chuckle, which proves that he is a living, thinking individual who has landed one the world’s worst jobs. Well, if nothing, at least I’ve broken the monotony of his tedious day. I’ve given him something he can share with colleagues on his next tea/fag break assuming call centres still provide such extravagant luxuries for their workers.
I know we are all supposed to just hang up but it would appear that the experts’ advice has not been taken on board. If we all simply hung-up, every single time and always, would marketing calls still be with us, more than a decade into the century?
The fact that they’re still coming in—harder and faster than ever—would indicate that the method has been meeting with some success. There’s got to be a few suckers out there who are responding positively and purchasing whatever is on offer otherwise, in this day and age of cuts and one person doing the work that 20 would’ve done in the 1980s, there is just no way companies would hire those least enviable of workers to make these calls. But, instead of hanging up, I’ve now discovered a way to make the caller hang up.
As soon as I hear the inevitable, “How are you today?” I launch into a monologue in Urdu—usually a poem I know by heart, or a recipe—anything at all, as long as it doesn’t contain a single word of English. The UK immigration authorities may not be amused but this is one instance when it is better to not understand English. Just keep talking in Urdu, Hindi, Bengali, Vietnamese, Mandarin-Chinese, Tamil, Basque or any of the languages you know and, sooner or later, the cold-caller is guaranteed to hang up and move to the next sucker on his/her list.
Jameela Siddiqi is a lecturer in Indian classical music at the prestigious Bhratha Vidya Bhavan and an almnus of the London School of Economics