start a victory garden and ration your IRRATIONALLY ANGRY feelings, part 3

i'm so often amazed and horrified by the chasm that must exist between myself/everyone i know and the businesses who phone you in response to an email enquiry or filling out a form or something. gyms are the worst culprits - i have no cause to talk on my phone in my working day and if i do answer it it's prob a family member telling me someone has died. i realise that might be extreme but i think most people just don't want to receive calls from businesses.

I won't get up to answer my house phone, but if I'm walking by while it's ringing I'll pick it up and sing them a tune.

lol yeah when i had a house phone it was basically an audio den of thieves

i'll be honest i don't bother answering the door plenty of the time - like if i'm working at home on a tuesday morning or whatever. maybe that's a sad indictment of modern life but i don't know that there's ever been a time where you get a useful caller on a tuesday morning. apart from a delivery which would always be expected.

one day recently i was coming back to my house with lunch and some hackney council survey people were outside and i said i didn't have time, entirely truthfully, it was a busy day, and the guy got really shirty, as if because i so happened to be coming in i had to do the survey. he was like "busy, oh yeah, sure..."

sounding like a bad misanthrope here, i like people i just really really don't like forced intrusion. i don't even like people trying to make me take a leaflet.

there's nothing misanthropic about hating people trying to sell you stuff

I usually have to pass by 3 or 4 people with petitions on my way to or from work, and I can get really annoyed at the ones who act all aggrieved when I don't stop for them and call out something like "So I guess you don't care about LGBT rights."

it becomes a problem when just to walk somewhere you have to weave in and out of people trying to hand you things or get you to sign stuff. i'm sure chuggers have come up before here plenty too.

I love it when they get shirty like that. I've always got time to snarkily argue with strangers, it's listening earnestly to the cunts pitching to me that I can't fuckin take

I knew I was going to love the show The Good Place in the pilot when Kristen Bell responds to "Do you have time to talk about the environment?" with "Do you have time to eat my farts?" and throws a coffee cup.

Dad tells me he's receiving telemarketing calls from a company that uses the same script over and over. He says hello, and I guess to cover that silence at the beginning of the call, this young female will say something like "Ooops! I dropped my headset for a moment!" Every. Single. Time.

Also, I was kidding about the straight citrus sausages.

I knew I was going to love the show The Good Place in the pilot when Kristen Bell responds to "Do you have time to talk about the environment?" with "Do you have time to eat my farts?" and throws a coffee cup.

lolz physically assaulting people who earn less than you lol lol roflmao

She doesn't throw it at him, she throws it on the ground next to a trash can.

pplains, the "dropped my headset" call is the robojunk I get most often too.

my old doctor's office will do it and never return to the phone. always the same receptionist that did it. would just get used to calling back and being like "hey again!"

when I was in NYC I called to make a reservation for a restaurant and they went off to check but forgot and never replaced the phone so it was constantly engaged. In the end I just walked to the restaurant and was like HI IT ME

I got the "dropped my headset" one a couple days ago, first on my cell and later on my home phone.

I usually reply, "I know! I dropped my keys on the stairs and I fell down and I lost my shoe."

"Oh really? Well, I just dropped this call!" CLICK.

The reason there is silence at the start of such calls is due to the fact theyre routed calls usually from overseas, and often via a VOIP network.

nah, I get those on local telemarketing. it's due to the auto-dialing system -- the caller doesn't actually get put on the line until you pick up and their autodialer software detects it

yea mh is right it's the auto-dialing system. i used to phone canvass for a state-wide environmental non-profit, all our calls were within ohio and they all had the pause. drove people nuts.

Ah ok, that'd also make sense! Most of the nuisance calls we get here are obviously from OS. No one'd pay a callcentre in Aus to make such crappy calls when you can hire 1000 people in Bangalore.

I used to get a lot of silent call-centre calls that would hang up after a few seconds of nothing, then (presumably) the same place would ring back to talk to me an hour later

is this 1. the system not detecting that I've picked up correctly, so hanging up instead of transferring me to a rep; 2. the system detects that you've picked up and said "hello? hellooo?" like a gullible moron that might give them money, and puts you on a list for bothering later; 3. other?

(I don't get many cold calls at this number yet so I don't know if they still do this)

The dropped headset calls I get are from a machine -- the first time it was really effective in making me think I was talking to a human!

Yeah, mine sounded exactly alike (down to pauses, inflection, etc), and I think I spoke on the first one and there was no indication that a person was speaking in real time on the other end.

fuck marketers. yesterday a guy rang our bell and said he needed to check our power supply (we're in a block of flats, there's no central power panel in the building). after a few vague questions about where the fuse box is, i asked him if he was selling power. "uh... yeah." i told him to "fuck off" and it felt fantastic.

for all my (historical) online bravado i'm pretty congenial in person, but this guy really flicked my tits

thatsmyfetish.gif

Yeah no, no one needs to come unsolicited to your door to check yr meter. Thats either a salesman or also very possibly a crook scoping you out.

it's happened twice this year already. both times they've come on with this "i've been sent to check your power, you just need to let me in k thx" spiel, and both times i've flushed them out as lying bastards. i feel sorry for the more gullible people who think the landlord/agent sent them round and happily let them in, fuck knows what they get up to once they set foot in the place.

good point re scoping crooks btw, that didn't even occur to me.

Its def a thing, especially if they ask to come inside!

jesus, thanks for the warning then. good job the building has a security door.

has it happened to you? i hardly ever answer the doorbell so it's not something i've come across

Not where theyve asked to come in, no - thats what rang my red flags err... as it were. But I have heard about it being a scam.

yeah it's weird. i've wondered whether they just want to be buzzed into the stairwell so they can knock on doors and try to wodge their way into people's front rooms just to sell shit (or case the joint, as it were).

The robocall I keep getting has the "oh, hello, sorry!" start that pretends they were using an auto dialer and took a second to pick up. Pretty obviously geared toward people who are used to answering marketing calls, follows by a pitch for some sort of vacation scam. the first time I did the "hello, hey, stop please. pleas remove me from your list" spiel, which a real person should take as a legal cease notice, at which point I realized it was fake. the second time I just hung up, since it's a randomized phone bank calling for different area codes and they're just hoping no state cracks down on them

can't wait for the fcc and state governments to defund all regulation and I just get the same endless pitches forever

> Yeah no, no one needs to come unsolicited to your door to check yr meter.

they do here (UK) - the meter reading is outsourced to a third party (G4S?) and they don't give notice, just turn up. so i often get buzzed to let them in. they are uniformed and carry id. and all the electricity meters are in the lobby so that's not a problem.

but the gas meters are inside the flats so they sometimes knock on individual doors too. again, not a problem because they are easily identifiable.

and they have to read the meter (as opposed to estimating the bill) once a year, legally.

haven't had my meter read in an age but then it seems a bit perverse to send meter readers out during the working day only

They got rid of meter readers here, and instead ask you to send the numbers over once a year. If you don't/too lazy (hi dere) they'll estimate and try again next year. One could perhaps try and screw The Man over but it's a hassle and the small percentage that gets away with it is nothing compared to what they saved sacking meter readers I suppose.

My doorbell has not been working for five years? Blessing at Halloween tbf.

they do here (UK) - the meter reading is outsourced to a third party (G4S?) and they don't give notice, just turn up.

victoria (australia) has things called 'smart meters' which can be checked remotely, so iirc nobody even needs to physically check anything ever. moving into a new place might be an exception, not sure, but in the normal course of metering nobody ever turns up out of the blue any more. so here, anyone who turns up unannounced with a shiny badge and no explanation is 100% a scam.

My doorbell has not been working for five years?

ours is wired to the mains and is shrill. as. fuck

Oof. I've been there. I'll happily go through life without having a working doorbell ever again.

How to spot a suspect meter reader:

SUSPECT: Knocks or rings doorbell. Holds clipboard. Asks politely if he can come in to check your meter.

LEGIT: You wake up to like a dozen diesel engines going off in your yard. There's a guy banging on your front door. "We're checking your meter back there, you don't have any dogs, do you?"

haha yes. when we first moved in, the gas company called us to say they couldn't find a way into the car park.

LOL our elec bills always say theyre estimated cos they cant access our meter (no idea where it effing is tbh - its not a smart meter tho)

I thought meter readers were as anachronistic as milkmen.

Every place I've lived since the late 90s has had meters (electricity or gas) indoors in the basement or garage, and they send in their readings automatically.

My current building just got "smart" meters, but they're "smartness" is that they can report exact usage by the minute. Self-reporting is old stuff.

in victoria i think we jumped straight from old-timey meters to minute-reporting meters. there were protests for some reason.