forgetful telemarketer

[KellyHabersham]

*not sure if the caller could really be considered a telemarketer or no, but this wasn't sucky, just somewhat amusing*

I was doing some work on the upcoming issue of our church newsletter, when I get a phone call from "Amelia" at (nearby ice skating rink), wanting to know if we had a youth pastor, or a youth group which did field trips......never got into details, but I assume she had some sort of group discount to sell. Anyhow, I told her that our church didn't have a youth director/group right now, and her response was something along the lines of "Well ok, thanks for your time then!", and she hung up.

Apparently "Amelia" wasn't keeping track of the numbers/places she called, because not quite an hour later, she called the church office again.....asking to speak to our non-existent youth pastor/director.

[bainsidhe]

Not necessarily. Most telemarketers (in my experience anyway) use some kind of auto-dial. Sometimes this situation may occur if she scheduled a callback (either on purpose or accidentally) and sometimes it means a different list of numbers is being used and sometimes it means the calling doohickey machine thing is just plain wack. I used to call to sell newspaper subscriptions and I remember one poor guy being called like a dozen times back to back. This is before the Do Not Call list, but we were legally supposed to remove his name after the first request. And I landed that 12th call. Actually the guy was pretty understanding and stayed on the line with me while management scrambled to solve the problem. Believe me, they didn't want to keep calling this guy either and were in a panic to fix it. At least the guy was nice.

[TexasT]

I worked at a car dealership as the receptionist one summer and I had a guy literally call me about 10 times in an hour or so with the same thing. By the end, I would just say, "You've called me already, I said no," and hang up. I could understand twice since we did have 2 working numbers, but after about a half dozen times, I was ready to scream.

[sanchopanza65]

We get those at the church all the time. They're usually from some sort of debt restructuring firm. The weirdest time one of those came in was 6pm the night before thanksgiving. If we hadn't had a service that night, I'd have never gotten that call. Usually, they hang up on me once they realize I have no financial power in the organization, although I did call them back once, because I thought it was important. That was interesting to say the least.