I should clarify that I’m using “telemarketer” as a synonym for “person making an unsolicited call intended to defraud me in some way.” Which, I will admit, isn’t fair to telemarketers, but the number of actual telemarketers, i.e. those operating within the law and for legitimate purposes, is vanishingly small. @LDoBe really put it way better than I did. (I will also admit to misusing the term “spam” as I almost never mean the food product.) I can recall maybe two legitimate (live) telemarketing calls in the past year or two (not that they were any less annoying, but they were legit).
And more often than not, it’s a robocall anyway, and I don’t even know about it unless or until it leaves a voicemail. (Still pisses me off, though.) IIRC the legal/legitimate circumstances for robocalling (e.g. school notifications) are even thinner than for live callers.
It’s that 1 out of 10 times where I’m caught off-guard (e.g. expecting another call), and I actually answer and the person on the other line is someone trying to get at my money and/or identity. It’s that context that I’m talking about (and, I suspect, that most of the rest of us are, as well), and in that context, no I don’t really hold them in higher esteem than the likes of Craig Brittain. Maybe somewhat higher; maybe one day I’ll try and measure how much.
The silver lining: realizing this, I now leave my phones permanently in “do not disturb” mode, and I haven’t had to answer a call in months. It’s remarkable how much life improves if nobody has the right to interrupt you any more.
Even when the calls are scams, I’d have more respect for people scamming the people running the operation, not the people at the bottom of the hierarchy making the calls.
I used to think wasting their time was best; drag the conversation out as long as possible, appear to be buying and then dropping them at the last moment, etc. But since many/most of these operations will be low-wage, high-pressure operations, I think this tactic might be hurting the poor soul who has to take these jobs. Dragging their “call conversion rate” or their “# of calls/hr” metric down might get them canned.
My personal policy is, until some kind of actual remedy for this is in place, that my time is my own; my outgoing message says “Because there are a lot of bogus calls, I don’t answer unknown numbers, and respond only if you leave a message. Please do. Thanks.”
If a caller then leaves no message, then either they were a robot, a bogus caller, or inconsiderate, and I block their number.
If I get that sort of call I say something along the lines of “Hey, it’s great that you’re calling! I’m with the sociology department at XYZ University and we’re conducting a study on the working conditions of call-center agents. Do you mind if I ask you a few questions?” They invariably hang up at that point.
OTOH, it’s great fun to torment fake “Microsoft tech support” people. When I have a little time to spare, I faithfully follow all the instructions they give me and complain increasingly fiercely when they don’t seem to work. Then I call their competence into question and demand to speak to their manager because they obviously haven’t the faintest idea what they’re doing. Haven’t we just spent half an hour on the phone and not a single thing they told me to do actually worked? None of the the programs they tell me to download even start up, and nothing in the GUI seems to be where they tell me it is, or do what they tell me it should do. If my computer is in such a terrible state isn’t it about time we got it fixed already? Wouldn’t it be better for me to bring it back to the shop where I bought it and let the guys there deal with it? Are they really sure they are certified by Microsoft? – Of course I’d be happy to tell them that I’m running Linux but I don’t volunteer that information and they never ask.
If there were some means of euthanizing someone over the phone I’d give serious consideration to it as an ethically preferable alternative; sparing any decent-but-pressured people from the grim fate of being a telemarketer, while purging the wicked in the spirit of efficiency rather than sadism.
