This is my second of three HUGE announcements. I am introducing the “Summon a Pirate” service!

To anyone who has used the Jolly Roger Telephone bots, you may have “lost” the telemarketer when trying to add the robot. The process today to add a robot requires you to place the telemarketer on hold, make an outbound call to a robot, and then merge the three calls together. I try to make it as fast as possible, but that second call to the bot can still take long enough time that the telemarketer gets impatient or suspicious and hangs up.

So I have a solution! Next time you get a telemarketer call,

1. Send a text message to 1-214-666-4321. In the text message, just give me the initials of the robot you’d like to call you. These robots are “Jolly Roger”, “Whitey Whitebeard”, “Whiskey Jack”, “Jolly Jenny”, “Debbie Doldrums”, and “Salty Sally”. So if you want Whitey Whitebeard to call you, just text the initials ‘ww’. Uppercase or lowercase. I’m trying to add all the autocorrect combinations too.
2. Within a second or two, the chosen bot will call you back! All you have to do is press “Answer/Hold”, then “Merge”, and then “Mute”. And there’s no time lost with the telemarketer. They probably won’t even notice.

So obviously, this is designed for mobile phones and it should make it much easier to get your telemarketers talking to a bot. However, the service also works for landlines as well! When texting me, just add enough final digits of your telephone number to make it unique. For example, if you have three telephone numbers in your account, just give me the last couple digits of the number you want the bot to call. So if you have a telemarketer on your landline, just text “jr 50” to 1-214-666-4321 and the Jolly Roger bot will call the number that ends in 50. You should be able to press Flash to pick up the bot, then Flash again to merge the three of you together.

One more little trick. If a bot is calling you and somehow you miss it and it goes to voicemail, you can text “hangup” to 1-214-666-4321 and the bot will hang up the call to you. This way you don’t get a 2 minute phone call of my bot saying “hello” into your voicemail (the bot will eventually hang up if it doesn’t hear any response).

And lastly, I want to make this as easy as possible. So you can actually just text complete gibberish to me and I’ll call you back from a random bot. For a random female bot, use the 214-666-4321 number. For a random male bot, use 214-666-4327. They both work the same, but the 4321 defaults to female, and the 4327 to male.

I am very excited about this because it should make it much easier to use this service from mobile phones. I have the “Landlubber” service to protect landlines, but my options are limited with mobiles. This should make it much easier for you to use these bots. Also, this opens up the bots internationally! With some preparation, I can call anywhere. If you’re not in the US, send me a note, comment, or message and we can figure out how to get this working for you.

Now, here is the scary part for me. Outbound calls and texting costs me money depending upon how many people use the service. This is a variable cost that I cannot predict. So in order to use this service, you need to have outbound calling credit in your account. I have added an item in my web store for “Summon a Pirate” credit. You get 200 minutes of usage for only $8. That’s only four cents per minute, but so far this is for the USA and most of Canada. So if you think wasting telemarketer time is worth it, then head over to my shop at www.jollyrogertelephone.com and get some “Summon a Pirate” credit. If you’re an existing subscriber, just put any of your telephone numbers in the text field when you purchase so I can match you up.

I am continuously enhancing this service for you and hope you stick with me! I’m trying to make this as automatic as possible. Now that I have texting integration, I will be expanding upon that feature and may make some other enhancements too. I look forward to hearing from you, so please let me know what you think and help me spread the word!

Thank you!

Roger

P.S. All “Deep Six” and “Cannon Shot” subscribers have 10 minutes of credit, so please try it out!