Clemency suggests

Email registration

Free weekly email update

Great products and special offers for Spectator readers

Click here for great value reader offers and events

Click here for the latest Spectator Wine Offers

Another Voice

Matthew Parris

Wednesday, 23rd April 2008

My heart bleeds for cold-callers — it must be the most depressing job in the world

It’s always happening. It happened again last Friday. I had finished my Times column for Saturday and, taking advantage of the two hours left of daylight, fetched the wheelbarrow, pick and spade and set to work finishing the construction of a stone table outside our house in Derbyshire. But hardly had I started work than from inside the house I heard the telephone ring. Downing tools, running up from the garden, shedding gloves and kicking off boots I reached it, breathless but just in time.

‘Good afternoon, have you thought about a new kitchen? Our company would be happy to visit free of charge and give you a quote...’.

I cut him short as I’ve learned to — the earlier you interrupt the flow the easier it is terminate these conversations, wasting less time on both sides — and, fighting my irritation, communicated more or less courteously my longstanding, unyielding, implacable, unalterable resolve not to have a new fitted kitchen, or a fitted kitchen at all. He took the news without arguing and I hung up and went back to my work.

But I could hear the disappointment in his voice. He sounded young and (from the timbre and something in the accent) probably black. As anger at the small but futile and uninvited interruption to my life subsides I’m always glad to have managed not to be unpleasant. But every time it happens again (on this occasion it happened again only an hour later: an offer of a different broadband telephone package) the instinct to snap at someone wells up anew inside me, and has to be suppressed anew. One learns to stifle the expression, but never the feeling, of annoyance.

And, no, this is not a bleat about the irritations of the age of telecommunication. Cold-calling by phone is only the modern equivalent of the door-to-door peddler, or brush or encyclopaedia salesman. I can just about remember these people beating a path daily to my mother’s door, and they were every bit as big a nuisance as unsolicited telephone callers, and harder to dispatch. Every age has its own mode of sleeve-tugging, and it would not surprise me if the proportion of our waking hours spent brushing aside attempts to attract our attention to one product or another on offer has remained remarkable constant over the millennia. So, I expect, has the annoyance.

1 | 2 | 3 Next page

More articles from: Matthew Parris | this section

Print this article | Email to a friend | Permalink | Comments (3)

Post this entry to: del.icio.us | Digg | Newsvine | NowPublic | Reddit

Nigel

April 25th, 2008 7:34pm

As you say it's a soul-destroying job and one which only the desparate are doing. I usually always try and be courteous in refusing the product/service unless they are extremely pushy. I recall one cold caller thanking me for being so polite and I felt sorry for all the gratuitous abuse he must suffer. There's nothing big or clever in being foul-mouthed to these people.

Adrian Fry

April 27th, 2008 11:11am

Surely the answer to telephone cold callers is an answering machine. The vast majority won't leave a message.

Pete

April 28th, 2008 5:10pm

I did a year cold calling (when I was 50!). It opened my eyes not just to how rude the British are (especially to my colleagues from India) but also to how gullible enough people are to merit this sales technique.
The company (a well respected one) was devious almost to the point of cheating in its sales technique. The product was, (as Matthew correctly points out) a poor one (Credit Card Payment Protection Insurance).
Matthew and Nigel are wise to be polite. The rudest have their numbers re-entered into the autodialler and the team-leader would often award a prize to the person who spoke next time to the customer if he got him/her to swear or say a particular word. Daft I know, but things like that helped pass the time and mitigate the effect of having a bad-mannered customer on the end of the line.
Both Matthew and Nigel are wrong to believe that the cold-caller is always leading a miserable existence. I worked with a great set of (mainly young) happy, well adjusted people. The working conditions were excellent, the pay okay (commission was top-hole) and the pension scheme, whilst not up to MPs or MEPs, was better than most.