The phone rang, at suppertime as usual.  Hubby and I both know what that means:  Either it’s a telemarketer or it’s Hubby’s mother, who belongs to the generation that always called at mealtimes because there were no answering machines and you were more likely to catch somebody at home then.

We have call display, so we knew it wasn’t Mum.  But we also have some new acquaintances whose numbers we don’t know at a glance, so I picked up.

Before I could even utter the second syllable of “Hello”, the world’s most obnoxious voice interrupted:  “Hi!  I’m Bob Shit-For-Brains (I admit I might have made up his last name), and I’m calling on behalf of the Society of-”

I hung up.

We’re in the Do-Not-Call registry, but nothing stops the idiot telemarketers.

I hate telemarketing companies; but I feel sorry for the poor employees who actually have to make the calls.  If our caller had been a real human being, I would have at least stayed on the line long enough to politely say, “Not interested”; but it was a recording, so I felt zero guilt about my abrupt disconnect.

(Well, okay; not zero.  I’m Canadian, so I did feel a teensy bit guilty even being rude to an obnoxious recording.  Sad, but true.)

But I wonder:  Who in their right mind would hire a voice actor who sounds like a cheesy good-ole-boy used car salesman?  Even if I might have been interested in their society, that voice killed any chance of me listening to their pitch.

But maybe it was the International Society of Cheesy Used Car Salesmen calling.  If they were doing a recruiting drive, then their choice of voice actor was a brilliant way to qualify their respondents… unless even cheesy used car salesmen can’t stand the sound of their own voices.  That would explain a lot.

What’s your favourite solution to automated telemarketers?  I like the idea of getting an autodialler of my own and setting it to call their company’s CEO at home, every ten minutes for the next five years…

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Thank you to everyone who voted in my poll last week!  I’m a creature of habit so I’ll probably continue posting on Wednesdays, but apparently I can stop obsessing about word count and schedules.  🙂  (To see the responses, click on the “View Results” link at the bottom of last week’s poll.)