A friendly chat with ‘Spam Risk’
It rings. You know the feeling. You have dripping wet hands from pre-washing the damn dishes (apparently not necessary anymore since the Second Vatican Council, as my wife tells me), or you are on another long distance call with family that you’re desperate not to drop to avoid soaking up the call-back fee, or you ‘just’ have to run up from the basement since you’re waiting for that repair service scheduling call that gives you the relief to know precisely which ‘4-hour-window’ of your life you will never get back …well, you fight back what sure looks & feels like an asthma attack, brave that razor sharp door frame that already took a junk out of your forehead the last time and launch yourself slow-mo-Matrix-like across the room to pick up your antiquated landline or your 28% charged “smart” phone — just in time to see it’s Spam Risk, yet once again.
How do they know when the least opportune time is to try a robocall for say additional car insurance (notably now also covering the added risk of hitch hiking aliens that could mistake a cigarette lighter for an AR/VR charging station), announce an actually quite informative sounding abdominal mesh survey (if you had one inserted or not, the client doesn’t care) or to peddle some product that starts, as far as I can remember, with “Hola, con permiso …” ? Pure Mindf*ck.
There are 2 ways to handle this situation elegantly — one is ‘The Seinfeld Method’ of hanging up sooner or later to laughter in the off (look up the episode on Netflix, my time is just too valuable to repeat it here) or if you don’t have a live studio audience, and admittedly somewhat counterintuitively, you choose to engage, start a dialogue with the professional interrupter that makes your Bourgeois life a living hell. Here are the steps to follow:
· First, I want you to wait politely for about 3.5 seconds — this is the average time it takes for an off-the-shelves server farm to switch between machines in Poland, Malaysia, and Burkina Faso — standard procedure to fake the call coming from your zip code and let’s be honest, much more fun for underpaid & out-skilled authorities to try and ultimately fail in tracking the originator down. Now you finally hear a click and a voice, right? Good.
· Secondly, pick an opening statement, ideally disarming. I like stuff that emphasizes nature, it’s both Zen and it makes you look caring, such as about fleeting resources, say: “Miss, not since hookers unionized did we see that much rubber change hands” — rubber being the resource here. While hilariously engaging, in the decision tree, this opening serves to quickly find out if you deal with an avatar or a call center in say Mumbai, just as an example. No this is not a play on the avatar missing the accent, it’s that the outsourced colleague, let’s call her ‘Jane’, answers with a noticeably indignant “Excuse me, Sir?” while the Avatar’s crude AI algorithm fails to appreciate the double innuendo subtleties and just hangs up. Got it ?
· So, let’s continue with Jane. No question, she will try to ignore your admittedly borderline foray into the intricacies of the indigenous latex trade and instead tries to give you the actual sales pitch for which she’s getting paid. Careful, Hombre - for what comes next is critical. At this point, your telephone number is being listed for the better part of eternity for — all — calls from this vendor, all 3rd party services in the same galactic quadrant and their every second extended cousins in Southeast Asia, so you might as well go totally nuclear. But remember, mindf*ck could advance to clusterf*ck.
· Personally, I’m not a huge fan of the ever popular “Let me talk to your supervisor”. One, you can only make that threat credibly once (unless their office personnel churn is higher than working for Kamala Harris) and two, operationally, it’s going to be the next desk over from Jane and for efficiency sake both BFFs alternate for each other’s super, exactly for occasions like these. So, you’d be back at square one, hearing the same pitch with a different voice — getting further and farther away from your brilliant opening. Don’t be a fool.
· Yes, Butch — you must step it up! And no, I’m not talking of sliding into the gutter of personal + extended family insults which only moves you up at breathtaking speed on that aforementioned ‘call this guy-at-all-times-for-all-sh*t’ list. I am referring to going the other direction — hit them where it really hurts, i.e., time wasted and missed conversion target numbers. Start pressing the caller with perfectly reasonable questions about the product that they won’t know how to answer and eventually come to regret having been put in the position to have to peddle this piece of crap to an over-educated yet under-employed simpleton like you with way too much time on his/her hands. Something along these lines will do for starters: “Does the new insurance also cover shortsighted aliens driving my car into a black hole, with fog lights switched on yet without wearing seat belts?” - or - “can I use that marvelous solar-powered food mixer, in color ‘azure’, in zero gravity space and at night, without donning proper eye wear?” Stay with me.
· As their opportunity costs rise with every minute they spend on what surely by now looks like another no-sale call, eventually, you make them deeply regret they’ve ever contacted you. Because you’re not a monster, you will let them go once you hear a sniff on the other hand coupled with a “Sir, I really got to go” that fails to hide some level of exasperation if not outright desperation. I bet you could reverse-sell her a time machine now for a 1000 bucks. Anyway, while Jane’s uttering a fake-sounding “Thank you for your time”, what can only be described as penultimate capitulation, rest assured that your name on said list is being decorated with an (*) as a dire warning for the international brotherhood of cold-callers and their dodgy bosses.
You know you’re on the home stretch when you’re going in for the coup de grâce: Thank them profusely for an engaging, highly informative call that you wouldn’t want to miss in a lifetime, ask for their (made-up) name claiming to give them a deserved 5-star shout-out on social media — and end with a thinly veiled threat as in “Talk soon again”, if you really want to put the cherry on, then hang up. Now quickly hit “block caller” and charge your phone for the next engagement (as this is one-at-a-time approach). Your work is done for now, or let’s just call it: Spam De-risked.
© Tom Deisboeck, 2022. All Rights Reserved.
