Shut Up TeleMarketers for Good

Raise your hand if you love telemarketers. Come on, you know you do. Lately I've been getting automated calls from carpet cleaning people. After about a dozen of them I actually listened to the end. Turns out there's a button you can push to make them stop calling.

The confessions of this telemarketer over at Consumerist can't stop automated calls (which I thought were supposed to be illegal anyway if you were on the Do Not Call list), but it's sound advice on dealing with old-fashioned human kind.

I won't hold you breathless. The secret, he says, is to be extremely firm in your mandate to get you off their call list: Soft refusals are called back again a few days later. After 2 soft refusals, you generally won't get called again on that survey. If you get very angry or start cursing, you get marked as a "hard" refusal and aren't called again for that survey. However, any of those three methods will just get you off of our list for that particular survey. Even asking us to put you on our "do not call list" will just remove you from that survey. The only surefire way to get off our lists forever is say something along the lines of "If you ever call me again, I'm going to contact my lawyer". You'll get an apology and be blacklisted from all of our systems.

The writer also notes that the general rule is that you should expect a whopping seven or eight calls of excuses or other non-refusals before they'll give up on you. I know it can be hard to be brusque with people and it's human nature to let them down easy, but in the case of telemarketers it seems that being crushingly firm, immediately, is best.

And in case you're hoping for a high-tech solution, most sources say that gadgets like the TeleZapper are no longer effective. If anyone knows of an anti-calling gizmo that still works in 2007, please let everyone know in the comments below.

Meanwhile, the Do Not Call list is your friend.