Some Tips on How to Handle Those Blind Phone Solicitors

How many times have you played out this scenario?

Once a month you have a steak for dinner. You look forward to it with almost the same anticipation as an Angel pennant--the difference, of course, being that the steak is a sure thing. You have neither eaten nor drunk too much that day so you can savor the steak fully. You cook it to the precise shade of pink. The moment comes. You sit down. The first bite is halfway to your mouth when the phone rings.

Your wife outlasts you, and you answer it. A saccharine voice says “Joe?” You don’t recognize the voice, but you’re afraid you should, so you answer a tentative, “Yes.”

The voice says, “This is Barbara”--and waits.

Your mind races. Barbara, Barbara. The wife of a good friend? The former student who wanted you to rewrite her book a few weeks ago? The friend who moved to Washington last year? A daughter you’ve misplaced? The stewardess who--surely not her?

The steak waits. You can’t stand on ceremony any longer. You’ve got to take a chance, so you say: “Barbara who?”

“Barbara from the Cheatum Mortgage Co., Joe. We’re prepared to offer you a deal on refinancing your house that you simply can’t turn down.”

You feel the red rise on your neck, and you want to kill. When this dialogue took place a few nights ago, I said to Barbara: “Do you know me?”

She hesitated, then said: “Well, not yet but. . . .”

“Then why do you presume to use my first name?”

She didn’t miss a beat. “I’m sorry, Joseph,” she said, “but let me tell you about. . . .”

I hung up. The steak was getting cold, and it didn’t taste nearly as good as it should have. I did a slow burn, angry at myself for getting angry. The telephone invaders had torpedoed another meal.

The blind telephone solicitation may be one of the more pernicious mutations of our allegedly civilized society. I have to assume this practice is--on balance--successful or the people needing contributions or customers wouldn’t hire these boiler room phone voices. But I simply can’t imagine anyone lonely enough to respond affirmatively to this outrageous invasion of privacy. An altogether unscientific survey of friends and acquaintances arrived at the same conclusion. Unanimously.

I think one of the things that infuriates me the most is being mousetrapped into expressing anger at the voice instead of the real source of the irritation. The people doing the calling are simply trying to earn a buck, and my wrath shouldn’t be directed at them. But I can’t get to the guy who runs the boiler room or the Cheatum Mortgage Co. or the Society for the Preservation of Deputy Sheriffs or whatever the hell other group is buying this service, so I end up taking it out on the person doing the calling. And then hating myself for it.

In my survey, I asked other people how they deal with these calls, which seem to take place mostly over the dinner hour--on the logical assumption, I suppose, that more people are likely to be home then. Here are some of the ripostes that people--as irritated as I am--have come up with:

As soon as the nature of the call is clear, simply lay the phone down and go back to whatever it is you were doing. Don’t hang up; let them struggle with a voiceless phone.

Put on the phone machine when you sit down to dinner. One friend has this message: “If this is a personal or business call, leave your name and number and I’ll call back. Otherwise, I’m already subscribing to all the newspapers and magazines I want, I never answer phone surveys, I don’t contribute to charities over the phone and I don’t need any light bulbs.”

Ask for literature about their cause. Tell them that you only make decisions from printed information and that they can get your address the same way they got your phone number.

If you aren’t in the middle of a meal and feel bemused, take over from them and talk a blue streak--about your recent operation, your financial troubles, your marital problems. Let them hang up.

Drop some kind of cataclysmic statement on them. Some that were suggested include: “Someone just died here”; “My kid just swallowed a frog.” You can come up with others.

If all this seems like overkill, so be it. But to me, phone solicitations are oral junk mail--only worse because you can throw junk mail away at your leisure without looking at it, but phone solicitations invade your privacy in an especially insidious way.

I know few people--and I’m certainly not one of them--who can resist a ringing telephone! One of your kids might be in trouble. An old friend might be passing through. Your agent might have just sold that book outline for a $100,000 advance. So you pick up the phone. And get Barbara.

They know that, of course, those people in green eyeshades who handcuff college students looking for pocket money to the telephones and give them a script from which to read. But I wonder if they have any real idea of the animosity these calls engender. Or--more to the point--I wonder if the people who hire these boiler room operations know that they are making lifetime enemies.

If this column conveys that message, I would be overjoyed. I want the people who pay for this invasion of my privacy--and ruined my steak the other night--to know that I wouldn’t use the Cheatum Mortgage Co. if they offered me the best deal in town. Or any of those other people who have disrupted my dinners.

A brilliant thought just occurred to me. If I wanted to take the time to track down the name and phone number of the president of Cheatum Mortgage, I could call him at dinner time. Just to chat. I don’t sound much like Barbara, but what the hell? I think he’d get the message.