SELL ME! SELL ME! SELL ME TRUE!!!

By Edwin Cooney

I know, you hate to admit this as much as I do, but you and I have been “sold” many times over. Let’s face it, it began with our parents.

They sold us on going to bed earlier than they did. Many parents sold us on Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and even the Tooth Fairy. When I was seven, I was so sold on the Tooth Fairy that I put a tooth under my pillow one night without telling anyone that my latest tooth had come out. Because I was so ashamed of myself, I didn’t tell anyone the next morning that he didn’t come. What had happened was that I’d put my hand under the pillow sometime in the middle of the night looking for my nickel and I realized I’d scared him off. I simply threw the tooth in the waste basket. Not even a Tooth Fairy wants a day old tooth!

Okay, confession time! I was once, not too many years ago, a telemarketer. I telemarketed for the better part of six years before becoming permanently burned out. Thus, the other day when I got one of those calls offering me a chance to purchase an inexpensive healthcare plan, I responded to the ad by pressing one as instructed. The conversation went something like this:

The Agent: “What kind of a healthcare plan are you looking for?”

Me: “I don’t know, I already have a healthcare plan, but you called me!”

Agent: Click!

I wasn’t, as I saw it, arguing with him, I was simply informing him of what the situation was from my standpoint. He was as “Gone with the Wind,” as was Rhett Butler from Scarlett. “Wow!” I thought, and am still thinking, “what kind of wimpy telemarketing is that!”

Last Saturday and Sunday evenings I got telephone calls from someone with a heavy Chinese accent saying that he was from Microsoft and that they’d been getting an error message from my computer a lot lately and that they were calling to fix my hard disc if I’d follow their instructions. Now, I’m naive, about a lot of things, yes, I hate to admit it but you, being my reader, you wear clerical garb these days. Thus, to you I must confess most, if not all! So, it is what it is! However, not even me, naive as I am, swallows that pitch. (Don’t you either since Microsoft doesn’t contact us!) When I wouldn’t follow their directives protesting that I needed to further consult my computer gurus, they hung up. The last time before hanging up they warned me that my computer was about to crash. “Then, it’ll crash,” I exclaimed.

Computer driven calls that you and I must respond to by pressing “1”, are becoming the latest device of entrepreneurial America. Furthermore, if you ask me (and you didn’t), telemarketers who use this device for evaluating potential clients or customers lose what respectability (and it was damned little) we 1980s telemarketers once had. Back then, most of us had only a phone book and as much grit as we could muster to conduct the intrusion we made on both businesses and private homes. I once asked a boss of mine how he’d like to receive calls from the telemarketers he was willing to employ and his response was something like this:

“I wouldn’t much like it any more than the housewives of days gone by liked visits from the Fuller Brush man or the vacuum cleaner salesman or the encyclopedia salesman, but this method of contacting potential customers is much less personally intrusive and even more cost efficient and that’s the bottom line.”

I could assert that everything from our spiritual faith to our patriotism has been “sold” to us and that we’ve paid for those with loyalty as the coin of the realm. However, it’s monetary sales ship that this is all about. What was especially nettlesome to me, particularly in the first instance cited above, the “salesperson” didn’t hang around enough to try and sell me anything. I do have a health plan that takes a bundle out of my checking account each month, and I was ready to give this “salesperson” a hearing. However, he/she didn’t want to even hear me out. He/she wasn’t interested in the customer, but only in the potential sale. The same thing happened to me when I got a call, about a month ago, from some company that wanted to lower my credit card debt. I pressed “1”, just to hear what they were selling and when I responded that I had only a small debt, well under a thousand dollars, click went the phone.

I suppose something can be said for cost efficiency, but, if you ask me (and you didn’t), there are two factors as important as cost efficiency at stake.

First, there’s the “free market!” After all, Conservatives insist on the “free market” as the center of free humanity. Of course, the potential customer is free to walk out of “the free market” but shouldn’t the entrepreneur hang around long enough to try and make the sale? Second, there’s good old fashion courtesy -- if you make a call, shouldn’t the call conclude, as much as possible, with a sense of mutual completion?

I understand that I’m a mere mortal who possesses only a few increasingly shrinking paper dollars to offer in return for the valuable goods, services, and time today’s corporations have to offer!

Hence, sell me if you must, but at least listen and please, sell me, sell me, sell me true!

RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,
EDWIN COONEY