Control Your Tongue

...based
on his brief experience in a telemarketing operation
that would stop the nuisance for all! time. The three little words
are: Hold On, Please...

Saying this while putting down your phone and
walking off instead of hanging up immediately would
make each telemarketing call so time-consuming
that boiler rooms would grind to a halt. When you
eventually hear the phone company's beep-beep-beep
tone, you know it's time to go back and hang up
your handset, which has efficiently completed its
task. This might be one of those articles you'll want
to e-mail to your friends. Three little words that
eliminate telephone soliciting.

Do you ever get those annoying phone calls with no
one on the other end?

This is a telemarketing technique where a machine
makes phone calls and records the time of day when
a person answers the phone. This technique
is used to determine the best time of day for a real
sales person to call back and get someone at home.
What you can do after answering, if you notice there is
no one there, immediately start hitting your # button
on the phone, 6 or 7 times, as quickly as possible.
This confuses the machine-dialed call and it kicks
your number out of their system. Since doing this, our
phone calls have decreased dramatically.

Another Good Idea

When you get ads in your phone or utility bill, include
them with the payment and let the companies throw them
away. When you get those pre-approved letters in the
mail for everything from credit cards to 2nd mortgages
and junk like that, most of them come with postage paid
return envelopes, right? Well, why not get rid of some
of your other junk mail and put it in these cool little envelopes.

Send an ad for your local chimney cleaner to
American Express. Send the pizza coupon to Citibank.
If you didn't get anything else that day, then just
send them their application back! If you want to
remain anonymous, just make sure your name isn't
on anything you send them. You can send it back
empty if you want to just to keep them guessing!

Eventually, the banks and credit card companies will
begin getting their junk back in the mail. Let's let them
know what it's like to get junk mail, and the best of it is
that they're paying for it--Twice.

Let's help keep our postal service busy since they
say e-mail is cutting into their business, and that's
why they need to increase postage again.