My wonderful crazy....husband and I were watching tv last night. In the middle of one of our favorit shows and the phone rings. I'm watching my husband to see who it is....if it was for me or what. Who ever it was, just kept going on and on and on. MY husband was listening patiently and then all of a sudden I hear my husband say.....

My name is Tommy and I'm going to get to ride in a police car. Then he says...I'm going to ride in a police car andddddd go get ice cream. Then he put the phone down and turned the tv back to our show.

He is just sooooo good at tel a marketing calls.

I just tell them to bugger off. I feel better for it.

LOL Telemarketer therapy.

I used to feel guilty if I wasn't pleasant to telemarkerters because some of my son's friends worked as telemarkers. Finally it dawned on me that the more time I spent with them on the phone, the less time they have to actually sell somebody.

Recently I heard that if you answer and there's silence and you know the switching thing is moving along the line of calls, you can press the # button 6 to 8 times and it will foul up their system and automatically delete you from the call list. I have no idea if it works but I've been doing it.

They definitely do use "private" and "unknown" to get past your caller ID these days. Everytime I'm caught off guard and answer, I kick myself.

In my Mom's day, the Arthur Murry studios (and other dance companies) called constantly. She told them that she only had one leg and she found that they wouldn't call back. She did this for fun with any number of solicitors - like with car sales, she'd claim to be blind. They'd shut right up when they heard her sad story. It was lots of fun for her and she considered it a challenge to come up with something creative with every phone solicitation call. She was a fun little gal, yes she was!

I tried to make her proud. When they start asking questions, I say... "oh I don't give information out over the phone, but I want to tell you about my children." If you go on ad naseum, they'll interrupt you and try to tell you why they're calling. They hang up very quickly after deciding you're a nutcase.

If instead, when they ask the first question you respond by asking them if they'd like to hear about your children, dog, grocery list, or whatever, they will tell you "no" and at that point, you can tell them that you aren't interested in what they have to say either and it's your phone. :eek:

When you are real busy and accidentally pick up one of these calls, the most effective and quickest response is to ask them to do what someone else here suggested, tell them to put you on their DNC list. They HAVE to do it.

This is good advice, BJean. I must admit that whenever I answer the phone and discover that I have a telemarketer at the other end of the line I am filled with a rich mixture of hatred and guilt: hatred, because I consider my home to be my sanctuary and I like to be left in peace; guilt because these poor sods have got to make a living, too. The folks I detest the most of all are the ones who come to my front door. Here in Toronto we have some very aggressive ones who are selling home energy plans. They will actually try to insist on examining your energy bills! And with spring the season of those marketers will once again be upon us. *sigh*

I had a terrible experience once with a Seventh Day Adventist couple who were going door to door with their little 4 year old girl.

It has always been my policy to politely turn people away at the door when they were peddling their stuff. If it was religious in nature, I explained that my beliefs were private and not something I discussed with strangers. (I had been innundated with extremely presistent LDS'ers in Arizona and I thought they knew every trick in the book until I met these Seventh Day Adventists.)

I nicely explained this to the couple with the little girl, who had her arm extended and a pamphlet in her hand reaching toward me when I opened the door. As they argued their case, she never wavered. The poor little thing was trained to just stand there with her little arm extended until some seemingly religion-deprived homeowner took the pamphlet.

I never did take the pamphlet (which would have been a complete waste of their material and a tree) and she never did drop her arm over the long minutes that they tried to convince me that I should discuss their religion and accept their reading material. Even after I told them I was Catholic and had plenty of reading material of my own she stood there, arm extended.

As far as I was concerned what they were doing to that sweet little girl, was criminal! I wanted to take my broom and chase that couple down the street and invite the little girl in for milk and Cookies and to play with my daughter.