Archive: Opinions

I take a very dim view of spam telephone calls.  Our office receives a much larger percent of these bogus calls than legitimate calls.  Such calls on personal phones is an intrusion, certainly, but calls to businesses disrupt the work flow. I would love to see statistics on how much money is lost because of spam calls.

After typing that I thought, 'I can get my wish' so I looked it up. According to a 2014 ZDNET article, "Small businesses are more dramatically impacted than large national businesses, which can direct incoming calls at scale through call centers. Answering spam calls wastes nearly 20 million hours a year for small businesses in the US - which translates to about $475 million annually."

They figure a spam call takes two minutes out of an employee's time.  I figure it takes more.  As soon as I realize a call is bogus I hang up.  I used to try to be polite, but in my old age I figure if they are rude enough to interrupt me, hanging up on them is the nicest I can possibly be.  So they don't get me for two minutes, or even the 30 seconds that is considered to indicate the call recipient may be convinced to buy.

The real damage is that whatever was in my head is gone after the distraction, and it's going to take me several minutes to remember it before I can go on with what I am doing.  So add a few year's cost of living rises to ZDNET's number, and then at least double it for the catch-up needed, and i think you have a more accurate idea of the cost of these calls.

That doesn't account for the money lost in scams.  According to MarketWatch, one in ten Americans lost money in a scam last year.  "On average, each scam victim lost $430, totaling about $9.5 billion overall. That was an increase of 56% from the 2015 survey, when victims on average lost $274 each,"  MarketWatch reported last April.  The article said that scams are up almost 60% from last year.  Maybe I should go into the scam business?  Sounds a lot more lucrative than the newspaper business.

Businesses are not supposed to be protected by the federal Do Not Call Registry, but I don't notice that preventing spammers and scammers from calling my personal phone.  The registry is a nice idea, but it assumes that the baddies will follow the rules.  That is faulty.  The way you get to be a baddie is to break the rules.  So it doesn't work.

I have learned not to argue with these people.  If they can engage you in conversation they are succeeding in not only stealing your time, but in being encouraged that they can get you to buy from them.  Don't say, 'Sorry, I do not accept solicitation calls,' because they will say, 'This is NOT a solicitation call' and then they will immediately start soliciting you.  Once, before I started just hanging up on these creeps, the solicitor was so affronted that he started arguing with me about the intent of his call.  He went completely off script, and seemed really angry at me.  Not a good way to bring me around to buying from him, or even talking to him.

Then there are the surveys.  What, exactly is a survey?  The people who call you will tell you that answering their questions will help them bring you a better experience of something or other.  My feeling is, why should I help a company make more money unless it's MY company?  And why should I take time away from my company doing what it does to scrape out a meager living to help some big company who can afford to hire telephone pollsters make a ton of more money?

The only exception I would make would be if my municipality called, as they did a few years ago when gathering information to inform a comprehensive plan that would influence the town's future.  Well, I would have if they had called me.  Or if they called me, but not while I was driving or eating dinner.  Or standing in line at Lansing Market.  Or reading a really good book...

If you get a call from your bank you should never give personal information.  You should call them yourself at a number you know is theirs, and ask whether they called you.  At that point, if they did, it is OK to talk to them.  Same with credit cards.  Same with everything else.  Email links should be verboten -- type in the address of the Web site (the one you know is the REAL Web site) and log in yourself.  Fake Web sites get your login information if you log into them, and they use it to log into the real Web sites.  When that is your online bank account management site it can be very, very bad.

But those are scams.  I am talking about spam.  Annoying calls that may or may not be of any value to you, but will certainly be of value to the caller.

Imagine losing $475 million in wasted time.  That is a lot of wasted time!  I am thinking of having my business phone disconnected.

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