all right, that's enough *click*

[calimac]

The canned recording phone calls are bad enough - "This is Jerry Brown, and I'm calling to invite you to a rally in Oakland ..." *click* I'm not going to no Oakland for no rally - "This is Martin Sheen, and this is really important ..." *click* No it isn't, whatever it is - but worse still are the live calls from get-out-the-vote people who think the best approach is to be folksy. "Hello, David?" says an unfamiliar voice in an unusually jovial manner against a background of office noise. Uh, yes? "This is Jack." I'm running through my mind thinking of guys I know named Jack - few, and none who'd phone me that informally - and what is going on here? I'm sorry, Jack who? And he starts babbling a sentence about get-out-the-vote and now I know what's going on, but I decide to keep on this path. Who is this? Do I know you? And he keeps saying he's Jack as if he's a friend of mine and tries to get back to his pitch, but I keep interrupting to ask his identity, and when he finally says, "No, you don't know me, but ..." I snap, Then don't address me like a close personal friend. That is extremely rude, and I do not wish to converse with strangers who speak in that manner. *click* I expect strangers who call me on business to address me by my last name, and to identify themselves immediately on calling, and just about all of those who call me on real business do, and the few exceptions are always responsive to a Who's calling, please? which is also what I say to strangers who ask for B. without identifying themselves first. As for me, when I phone anyone, even friends, whom I don't speak to regularly on the phone - and there's only about three people I do speak regularly to on the phone - I've discovered that the best way to avoid confusion is to speak like the canned recordings and begin by announcing my full name, especially as they may know other Davids, and if they're like me, they may not place my voice immediately. If they ever said, "David who?" - and they never have - I'd have failed. So why can't phone solicitors learn to talk on the phone well enough to even get to their pitch?

Comments

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

I'm ignoring them all.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

It's only possible to ignore them once you find out what they are. What if I did have a friend named Jack?

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

It's the caller ID==they all say out of area, or something similar. So I let the message machine pick them up, and when I go through the messages, the first few seconds confirms, and DELETE. I think I deleted nine yesterday.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

I must say, I was briefly tempted by the thought of a simple algorithm: put up a chart of candidates and propositions, and keep count of the number of times I'm urged to vote for or against each, and vote in every case for the more restrained option.

This would need a couple of tweaks to optimize it:

For candidates, ignore the minor party ones, who don't have the money to be really obnoxious. Or, I suppose, roll a die to pick one.

Phone calls are more annoying than junk mail, so they ought to get several points, not just one. Television commercials would be in between, I guess, if I'd watched any broadcast television in the past three months. Not sure what to do about Web advertising; I don't even see it if I don't make a conscious effort, which would kind of defeat the purpose! [I must say, a couple of times, junk mail in favor of candidates has convinced me that they're absolutely not people I could support!)

It's more trouble than it's worth, and I would have to start it at the outset of the election cycle. But it's not without appeal as fantasy.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Three problems:

1) Campaigns have algorithms identifying probable supporters, and you're more likely to be called by causes you support. To vote against your own desires just because the ads are annoying would really be cutting off the nose to spite the face.

2) I would have to stay on the phone long enough to find out for sure what they support. Admittedly, if they start by saying, "This is Jerry Brown" in this election, it's not difficult, but it's not always that easy.

3) This may sound ridiculous, but I've heard of actual attempts to take advantage of this irritation by packaging annoying canned calls as if they supported the opposition.

Once there was a hard-fought legislative primary here with three candidates, all of whom called asking for voting preferences, since there was little demographic data that could be used to base this on. I finally took to answering, "We're planning on voting against any candidate who phones us more than once," and boy did they hang up quick and not call back. We did, too.

[scribblerworks.livejournal.com]

I was actually a shade rude to one in-flesh caller last week, who was calling about the Senate race, because I was being urged to vote for their favored candidate on the basis of ONE issue. This year, with SOO much that needs addressing, I'm a little bit more concerned with over-all issues. Because I'm not much happy about any of my options.

[lisa-marli.livejournal.com]

David, It's Jack Lewis calling from the grave?
At least he didn't call you Dave. XD
Big Harold gives the 998 number to the registrar of voters. It's a real number, it belongs to us, it is hooked to the fax machine and a message machine. We just erase all commercial and political messages, which are most of what goes onto that line.
And I've never given the cell phone number to those kinds of places. That must be really annoying to get political messages on a cell phone. Using Your Minutes to annoy you. Adding Insult to Injury.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

If they're taking the name from a formal document, they'll use the formal version. Who's to tell if a strange Elizabeth is Liz or Beth, or neither, to take just one obvious case? (Could even be Lisa. Lisa Goldstein is actually an Elizabeth, did you know that?)

People who are known by their middle names at least have a filter for strangers who take legal documents as their source for personal intimacy. Anybody ever called Sprague de Camp "Lyon", he'd know instantly they didn't know him.

[lisa-marli.livejournal.com]

You would be surprised the number of people who want to sound like they are chummy with Harold have called him Harry. :P We just hang up on them.
And I had to stomp down hard on someone who insisted on calling Kirshner "Irv" to make himself sound like he was in the In Crowd. Even the Star Wars Fan Club Newsletter announced that Kirsh hated his first name and only used Kirsh and Kirshner. This wasn't some big In Crowd secret. I didn't know his first name until I read it in a credit, and he's a long time family friend.
And some people try to make me a "Liz". I have never been a Liz or Liza. I spell my name with an "S". ;)
*sigh* The Naming of Names.

[scribblerworks.livejournal.com]

And then there was the person who wanted to sound like he knew JMS by speaking of him as "Michael" - because of course the credits read "J. Michael Straczynski". But anyone who has sat in the room and listened to JMS talk knows he almost always begins by saying "Call me Joe". (Oh, gee. "Joe reads the boards" - that takes me back to the days of GEnie!)

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

"Harry? There's nobody here by that name, sorry," click. That's how I'd do it, as an excuse to get away.

I could picture Harold as a Harry, if that were indeed his name, but I can't picture you as a Liz at all.

[scribblerworks.livejournal.com]

Bravo for you! I totally agree. I hate that over-familiarity.

When I moved to California from Texas, I had one friend in Austin who would call me long-distance (before she died). This was before I had caller ID. I'd pick up and she'd just say "Hi." Made me crazy, because the sound was so short it was hard to identify her voice. Plus, there was a sort of underlying assumption that I had no other callers, so who else would it be but her? Heh.

Me, I never assume that the recipiant has caller ID turned on, or that they can identify my voice over the phone. I almost always start out "Hi, X! It's Sarah Beach..."

Still... I admire your persistence above. :D

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I tend to leave out X's name in those circumstances. I used to include it, but too often I guessed wrong from the sound of a mere "Hello?" whose voice among the members of the household it was. This led to complications when the person I wanted to speak to was the one who actually answered the phone and not the one I thought I was speaking to, so the person who answered the phone (whom I wanted to speak to) would automatically put the phone down and go get the other person (whom I did not need to speak to).

Then there was the mortifying occasion when I called a woman I knew and thought I'd reached her teenaged son, but instead was hearing the soft and boyish voice of her husband, and when I said, "Could you get your mother, please?" ... oh dear ...