Three minutes of entertainment

The phone rings. I answer it. “Hello, Orest here.”

The silence and the click are my first clues that this is a telephone solicitation call.

A moment later she speaks. “Hello, is this Mr. ...” and she mangles my last name. If she had paid attention when I answered the phone she’d have known who this was. “Did I pronounce your last name correctly, Mr. ...?” she asks and mangles my last name again.

“No,” I say in an unfriendly tone.

She just continues with her script. “This call may be monitored or recorded for quality purposes.”

Excellent. This recording should be an educational case study for whoever ends up reviewing the call. Perhaps I should have told her “This call may be blogged for entertainment purposes.”

She asks me a bunch of questions such as “Do you have a personal computer”, and “Do you make purchases online”, to which I answer no to all, in the same tone.

She just continues with her script and tries to sell me insurance anyways. She is using the “assumed close” approach. I let her go through her script, during which period I become all the more convinced that I do not want to buy what she is selling.

She finishes her script and asks me the question to confirm my identity so that they can send me their package which I can cancel after so many days if I don’t want it.

“Thank you for your call. I’m going to pass on your offer. Have a nice day,” I tell her in a kind, final, and guilt free tone. I decline without actually using the word "no". Verbal kung fu - I give her no resistance that she could push back against.

She thanks me for my time. I say goodbye and hang up the phone.

I think about the Tony Robbins lesson about the noisy train that goes by and disrupts one of his seminars, and how he responded.

Woo hoo! A telephone solicitation call! Three minutes of entertainment, and I get to practice saying no, and I get to contribute to the amount of quality in the world. Woo hoo!