Irony! Telemarketer tries to sell TELEMARKETING SERVICES to my bot

For those of you who don’t know me – I build robots that speak with telemarketers to waste their time.

This latest example is absolutely amazing! This is a telemarketer selling telemarketing services to a *bot* designed to waste telemarketer time. One of my subscribers to the Jolly Roger Telephone Company got this call and added in my bot. So first I want to say thank you for sending me this call – it is a wonderful demonstration of irony.

Now, if you are familiar with telemarketing, you’ll recognize this “lead generation and scheduling” business model. This is where a lead-generation company calls you to see if you’re interested in something like a construction quote, solar panels, a vacation plan, health insurance, credit card interest reduction, etc. These guys get yelled at all the time but they’re paid not to care. They’re probably offshore and they could care less about Do-Not-Call laws in any countries. Basically, their job is to deal with 100,000 answering machines to find 1,000 real people. Then, of those 1,000 real people, they find ONE PERSON who needs a new roof (ignoring the screaming and begging from the real people to PLEASE STOP CALLING ME!) Then they schedule an appointment between the person and their client, let’s say a roofing contractor, and charge them for the lead. During the process, the roofing contractor is comfortably anonymous until the lead generator finds a friendly and interested party. Sounds pretty nice for the roofing contractor, right? It’s probably pretty cheap too.

Meanwhile, that contractor’s lead-generator just choked the telecommunications network with 100,000 spam calls. And after a couple hundred spam calls *per person*, telephone customers start dropping their landlines and stop answering their mobiles. In my opinion, this is not an acceptable use of the telecommunications network. And apparently many of you agree.

Alas, there is no regulatory way to fix this. The typical ways to break this business model will break plenty of legitimate businesses too. For example, auto-dialing, caller-id spoofing, and cheap SIP-based telecommunications services are all used for legitimate purposes. What we need is a more creative solution. How crazy is it that my service can make you say “Now I looking forward to telemarketer calls!”

So please listen to this call, but for more entertainment, check out my YouTube channel, Facebook page, and Blog.

My goal is to get you to love your telephone again!

Roger