Just before I had Bene, I made a very positive choice not to do something. I didn’t replace our house phone, which had bitten the dust in dramatic fashion, running out of battery within minutes and randomly spewing out ansaphone messages from up to 4 years ago to unsuspecting grandads who called home and were rather surprised to discover we were busy packing Christmas orders and to please not call us at 11pm as we work from home. I can’t even remember the last time someone I cared about, other than him, tried to call us on it. 2 members of my birth family live in other countries, the other two communicate by text because we all have busy lives, I have free minutes on my mobile, which is more than could be said for my home phone contact at the time and I rarely need to ring an 0800 number, because if I’m annoyed with a business, I tweet them.
So at 8 months old, Bene’s lived his whole life without a phone call interrupting his little life. The great, the ENORMOUS, difference between having his eldest sister back in 1998 and having Bene, is that I can have my whole life next to me on the sofa when I want it. Or I can leave it behind when I want a complete break and to just focus on his little face and his needs. I can turn my phone to silent, safe in the knowledge I can still see who is and deal with emergency calls and that if my phone failed, I could be contacted by email. I can choose how I engage with the outside world, dip in and out, call people, text people, decide to answer an email or a text tomorrow, explore a brand at 3 in the morning.
You know what?
I haven’t missed the telephone at all. I haven’t missed calls about double glazing, or debt consolidation, or ambulance chasers or people who want me to sign up to a new energy deal. I’m pretty sure I’m no worse off either. The time involved in dealing with the fall out from swapping internet or gas provider far exceeds the money saved. I haven’t missed BT phoning to tell me they can better any deal I’m currently on, when I was with them anyway and galled to the extreme I wasn’t getting the east deal simply for being loyal. I haven’t missed the people calling me, based on my postcode, to offer me an insulation ‘government sponsored deal’ for my older home when my postcode is made entirely of new builds and the conversation leads, after 5 minutes of preamble, into a discussion about how I’m not eligible for the deal but could still pay for them to improve my house. I haven’t missed people calling me to tell me my mobile contract is expiring and I need to upgrade “so shall we get started” only to find they are just hoping to dupe me because they have no idea at all who I am with, what my deal is or when my contract expires.
Nothing has interrupted the precious time I’ve had with him as a new baby, unless I invited it to. That matters.
I get annoyed with all those approaches but the thing that irritates me the most is it makes me rude and abrupt to some poor sod on the end of the phone doing a job they probably hate just to earn a crust. At least they are trying.
The main reason I disconnected was pay back for the people who did baby calls to me after Freddie died. They couldn’t have known, I know they didn’t know, but they didn’t remove me from their databases when I asked them to. I got too, too many calls from places I had signed up to. Too many calls, too many letters, maternity wear shops, nursery websites, places I might have taken him. Their database numbers mattered more than my feelings and they didn’t stop – and it’s a problem too many people in that situation had. So in my post Bene vulnerable state, I didn’t want to talk to anyone I would have blurted to.
The very worse offenders in general, it has to be said, are business to business callers. Having run a business from home, I’m stuck with a legacy of people who have this number as a business line. So I get SEO companies phoning to try and bludgeon me into using black hat techniques to promote my websites, with bullying tactics such as (and I quote) “well you are clearly a s**t business owner if you don’t want more sales then” and “well, you obviously don’t know anything about selling on the internet because google thinks your businesses are cr*p” (back at ya babe!) I long ago learned to just gently place the phone down on the table on them and walk away, leaving them to talk themselves to a standstill. It’s a couple of years since Max got talked into taking a business to business deal on the phone, from an unsolicited by plausible call, that nearly cost us thousands because of bullying tactics with no time to think.
I did eventually find the time to sign up to the service that allows you to opt out of cold calling and that seems to have had some partial success because having suddenly found myself in need of a home phone again (sociable daughters who no amount of free minutes can satisfy) I’ve found myself remarkably unbothered by callers this last two weeks. Perhaps it worked; perhaps they all just got bored. The new phone plugs in and can’t be lost in the house, which is another advantage. I so remember, back when Fran was a baby, being settled on the sofa, a snoozing baby on my lap (at last!) and the shrill ring of the phone I couldn’t get to or couldn’t find disturbing us. Back then I would have to find it because I would worry it was important, or want it to shut up or perhaps even need the social contact. It would be gutting to disturb her only to discover that it was an offer of yet more discounted electricity bought with the price of my sanity.
One thing I have genuinely discovered – and it behoves me to think carefully about it as a business owner too – is that unwonted, unsolicited contact puts a brand on the list of people I will never deal with. It turns me off utterly. I dislike the arrogance of people thinking I want to spend my precious evening time discussing their product on their terms. I dislike the calculated nature of the sales pitch. I loath ones dressed up in a guise of knowing me or dealing with a problem they are pretending I have. I don’t want to have to be savvy about fraudulent calls. I refuse to talk to my bank on the phone now, partly because they are annoying and pretend to need to talk to me when they really just want to sell to me but mostly because they want to call me and then make ME prove who I am. I’m tired, with a busy life and a baby. Write to me if it’s important. But ONLY if it’s important. Otherwise, you know, leave me alone. Don’t call me, I’ll call you!
So tell me, what do you think about cold calling and unsolicited sales calls? Does it bother you? Do you have a tactic? Do you rant, rave or pretend to be interested? tell me 🙂
Disclosure: Bounty sent me the phone pictured in exchange for this post. Ironic, no? Views and feelings are my own and my phoneless state for the last 9 months is entirely genuine! So far, only grandad has called our new purple phone 😉
I only have the house phone because my parents live in Seattle and my Mum calls religiously every Monday afternoon. Having said that I guess I could unplug it for the rest of the week and I bet my sense of calm would dramatically increase.
I hate the cold callers so much. We have been on the TPS list for years and still get some, it doesn’t seem to apply to companies with call centres outside the UK. I spent a lot of time with my phone unplugged when my kids were little and still turn the ringer off alot.
We don’t have enough mobile phone signal here to use it for emergencies else I would be happy to get rid of the house phone.
I can’t bear businesses or anyone else calling me on my mobile so I only ever give the number to friends. I cannot bear the intrusions of being called when I am out by people that I don’t want to speak to. For that reason, free calls on my landline and not enough reliable mobile signal in my house because of those stupid trees, I would never get rid of my landline. I don’t get bothered on it very often either by sales calls.
I really really hate cold callers! I don’t understand how they manage to make any business as I don’t know anyone who responds positively to them. I do like your new funky phone though 😉
I barely answer my home phone, and have been known to switch it off if Ernest is napping and then forgetting to switch it on again, that works pretty well!
(While I’m here, I wanted to apologise for the last comment I left on your blog, it was vague and stupid and probably rude. I’m sorry.)
x
I loathe and detest cold calls with a passion, and though we’ve been with TPS for years, we still get up to 20 a day, from 8am to 9pm. I suspect it has been exacerbated by working from home, but now I even get them on my sodding mobile. And that ‘confirm your identity’ thing drives me mad. I also hate that I’m being nasty to people who probably hate what they are doing as well, though I have been sworn at, called an idiot and threatened by cold callers, ESP of the SEO variety.
You know when you’re at a picnic and you kind of leave a cake or something out for the wasps – that’s the wasp cake and it leaves you free to enjoy the rest of the meal? well that’s our landline – it’s the wasp phone, the number we hand out when we don’t want to talk to someone. Email or mobile for people we want to talk to. Cold calling has killed our phone and I only keep it so I can call 999. And personally make it my business to NOT EVER give business to a cold calling company. BT heed my warning!
OK, first things first, I love that purple phone. Secondly, I absolutely get why you didn’t want a landline. The only people who call us on ours are my parents and recorded answer phone messages about PPI that we never bought. Our phone’s been broken for 2 weeks. The only time I’ve missed it during that period was yesterday afternoon when O2 coverage failed (again) and I had no way to contact my husband and remind him to nip to the supermarket on the way home. Either we need to get the phone fixed, or the husband needs to join Twitter.
I have never answered my land line phone…ever. We have it simply because it’s a good emergency back up if the mobiles go kaput but we have no use for it.
If it rings I dial 1471 and check the number online – 9 times out of 10 it’s BT themselves or a company who have been marked out on one of those cold calling websites as a nuisance number. Gotta say it never rings more than once or twice a week happily 🙂
oh I so agree with you!
I pretty much only use the phone to communicate with my mum and, every 5mnths or so, our hairdresser!
Saurus & Roo LOVE to answer it so i’ve trained them to field all the sales calls – just put it down for a recorded message, and a polite ‘no thank you’ and put it down for everyone else. Papacrow finds it hard to say no sometimes, so I suggested he say ‘sorry, our policy is not to do business over the phone’ which helped him out!
I’m always as polite as I can be, as I did spend some time in a cold calling double glazing job as it was the only job I could find that fitted round my first baby & the shift work that Papacrow was on, and we were desperate for money. It’s the only job I’ve every been ashamed of doing – I’d rather clean toilets (and have), that’s an honest days work!
My mobile coverage is not good at home. Always use landline as preference. I’m not at home in the day and we hardly get any calls after 6pm. Am being hounded by an 0800 number on my mobile though, much to my annoyance. No idea who it is. On the occasions I Pick up, there never seems to be anyone there.
We loathe cold callers with a passion. Even after being here over 4 years we still get sales calls for the lady who lived here before us and has died! Drives us barmy as the callers say stupid things like “Are you sure she’s dead? Couldn’t you go fetch her?”
We do random things like get the younger kids to answer and say pardon over and over and over again.Many are thhwarted by the fact that we are tenants, or I tell them I dont live there. Or leave the caller to talk whilst we head off to do other things. Or just immediately hang up.
Our latest irritation has to be the ones about ppi “We want to help you claim back your ppi”
Erm, sorry I never had ppi… “oh but you must have, over 40% of people do” Well I dont, having never had a loan and my catalogues were checked for insurance, hard luck mate!”
I certainly wouldnt do business with anyone who calls me in that way.
our drs have an 0844 number, which I use the landline for, and we have some free calls- but I’m not sure when or who to. the only people who ring the landline is friend across the road ( has free minutes) and dh’s parents. we very occasionally ring siblings abroad, but mostly its junk calls for the previous owners of our landline. we now know their names,and address, their glasses are ready at boots…
I hate those silent calls and then you wait (because my Mother is ill, and wouldn’t want to hang up on her by accident) and it turns out to be some stupid finance company!
We get calls for my father, who died five years ago, and calls for the lady who lived here before he bought the house, twelve years ago, from British Gas Business, for someone who has never lived here. Really, we would be better off without it.