No one likes junk mail, phone solicitations or SPAM which is why I didn’t immediately delete the email that was forwarded to me (and reproduced below) purporting to be “Andy Rooney’s Tips for Telemarketers.” I thought it was kind of funny so I didn’t even bother checking it out on www.snopes.com to see if it was legitimate. It contains some possibly useful tips for fighting back. The most important tips of course are to guard your personal information and to register all of your numbers on the National Do Not Call Registry. That done, perhaps you’ll want to try one of these.

For Phone Calls:

Three Little Words That Work! The three little words are: “Hold on please.” Saying this, while putting down your phone and walking off (instead of hanging-up immediately) makes each telemarketing call more time-consuming making boiler room sales much less efficient. Then when you eventually hear the phone company’s “beep-beep-beep” tone, you know it’s time to go back and hang up your handset, which has efficiently completed its task. These three little words will help eliminate telephone soliciting.

More on Phone Calls:

Do you ever get those annoying phone calls with no one on the other end? This is a telemarketing technique where a machine makes phone calls and records the time of day when a person answers the phone. This technique is used to determine the best time of day for a “real” salesperson to call back and get someone at home. What you can do after answering, if you notice there is no one there, is to immediately start hitting your # button on the phone, 6 or 7 times, as quickly as possible. This confuses the machine that dialed the call and it kicks your number out of their system. Gosh, what a shame not to have your name in their system any longer!

For Junk Mail:

When you get “ads” enclosed with your phone or utility bill, return these “ads” with your payment. Let the sending companies throw their own junk mail away. When you get those “pre-approved” letters in the mail for everything from credit cards to 2nd mortgages and similar type junk, do not throw away the return envelope. Most of these come with postage-paid return envelopes, right? It costs them more than the regular 37 cents postage “IF” and when they receive them back. It costs them nothing if you throw them away! The postage was around 50 cents, before the last increase, and it is according to the weight. In that case, why not get rid of some of your other junk mail and put it in these cool little, postage-paid return envelopes. One of Andy Rooney’s (60 minutes) ideas: Send an ad for your local chimney cleaner to American Express. Send a pizza coupon to Citibank. If you didn’t get anything else that day, then just send them their blank application back! If you want to remain anonymous, just make sure your name isn’t on anything you send them. You can even send the envelope back empty if you want to just to keep them guessing! It still costs them 37 cents. The banks and credit card companies are currently getting a lot of their own junk back in the mail, but folks, we need to OVERWHELM them. Let’s let them know what it’s like to get lots of junk mail, and best of all they’re paying for it …TWICE! (Ed. Note: my guess is that the people who make the decision to send these out are not the minimum wage workers opening mail in some warehouse in South Dakota. That said, the less successful and more expensive that unsolicited mail campaigns become the more likely that marketers will turn to “permission” marketing.)

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 24th, 2005 at 8:41 am by Insider and is filed under Brilliant, but uncategorizable, Weekend Edition / Features. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.