Working from home has its pluses and minuses – one of the big minuses is all of the telemarketing calls we still get on our home phone – yes we still have one of those because a) my wife Kitty insists that we have a backup – it’s part of the mini-survivalist within her and b) it was free with the high speed internet – I mean its $40 with our without a phone line and since I can’t pass up free stuff, we got it.
One good thing about automation in the telemarketing industry is that most telemarketers have moved to an automated system which simply calls one number after another and only when the phone is picked up, does the call get passed to a human.
Use this “pause” to your advantage: the phone rings, I say “hello” – if there is no immediate hello back – and you know what I mean by immediate – if you hear any kind of pause or hesitation, just hang up. Their system will then mark that call as completed and either take you off the list or move you to the end of the queue. Computers are stupid – they think that the call was completed so they mark you off and move on.