Peace Restored
So almost 30 minutes after I wrote the previous entry, they called me back. This is roughly how the conversation went.
"Hello."
"Hi! I'm calling you because we have an exciting promotion from Mercury News that you might be interested in." [I stopped listening at this point, but she was going through the cost per day of a newspaper, blahblahblah.]
"I don't read the Mercury News, or any newspaper, for that matter."
"But you could have the Mercury News delivered to you for just $29.99 a month!"
I smiled. This was where it was going to get fun.
"Oh, where will they deliver it?"
"They'll deliver it to your home everyday!"
"Really? To Taiwan?"
[pause] "Huh?"
"I'm in Taiwan. I don't think you deliver this far, do you?"
[pause] "I'm calling Taiwan right now?"
"Yes." (This isn't completely true, since it's a VOIP number that has a 408 area code, but whatever.) "Oh, so while I have you on the phone, could you please take me off your call list--"
[sudden click]
I guess the girl thought she was incurring long distance charges, particularly to talk to a guy who was not interested in their special promotions, and she was probably afraid she'd get dinged by her boss on why these calls were being made. Ha. Serves her right.
7 comments:
Grrr...doesn't that just suck? Next time, I'm going to ask for HIS/HER number and ask if I can call them back at home. And you want to leave your phone on silent/vibrate so you can sleep but what if this is the one nite you get an emergency call? Grrr...
glad it at least got sorted out tho
what's a VOIP number?
Man, I would love to have an opportunity to talk to a scam telemarketer... ESPECIALLY while living abroad. Of course, you'd probably have to have an idea of what you want to say in your mind.
What I would do is listen to their entire schpeal, ask a bunch of questions about the plan, ask them things about whether it's a scam as reported on the internet, ask her out on a date, and THEN say that you're in Asia.
Actually, they called again this morning (at an at least acceptable 8am), but it was a different guy. Same schpeel, and I had to interrupt him twice before he would let me tell him that I'm in Taiwan. And he said he would remove me from their call list.
I hope that's the last of it.
Bravo guys. This is really a great help and a good way to have your sleep uniterrupted.
Thanks for the tip. I'm in Silicon Valley and they have been calling eight to ten times to my office phone already. I'll try my Kiwi accent. Thinking they've called New Zealand ought to be at least as scary to them as calling Taiwain.
:+)
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