Quote from: Dena on May 23, 2017, 09:45:52 PM
At work my boss would receive cold call for investments and they would get past the receptionist by claiming the call was personal. My boss ask the receptionist to find out what the call was about before passing them on. He also added if they refuse to say, the receptionists were to tell the caller that he doesn't do drugs and he doesn't have a mistress so it ain't that personal.
I used to work in a document center for a law firm. The receptionist would just directly transfer calls to us when they said one of the names of the people in the document center or if they said 'Doc Center, Mail room, Copy Center.' More than 75% of them were junk calls. Especially since the receptionist quickly learned who was related to us. (Course caller ID helps so if the last names matched...) Usually, we ended up saying something like, 'Oh, that's not us you want to talk to,' and transferred them to our HR director lol. ESPECIALLY when they were rude as... and kept calling.
Too bad we didn't think of this approach though! LOL.
Quote from: PaulaLee on May 24, 2017, 08:22:17 AM
I had some fun with a similar situation. Many years ago when we were really struggling financially, I had a bill collector call for my wife. I very politely asked him who this was and why was he calling my wife. He told me his name and said he was calling her on a personal matter. Of course I knew why but I decided to have some fun. So I asked him again who he was with and when he said it was a personal matter again. I said "OHHHH, you must be the guy my wife is cheating on me with!!!" He started to stutter and ramble so I just played it up like "You are the reason I may be getting a divorce" and such....it was mean and funny at the same time. We never heard back from them again...LOL
I'm dying from this one!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Quote from: Steph Eigen on May 24, 2017, 07:12:25 AM
A related situation years ago in the day: I wanted to really take advantage of an incredible offer joining a book club, you know, the 10 books for $10 up front offer. It was on exotic technical and scientific books that were insanely expensive at the regular club price once a member but there was only obligation to buy a couple books over the fist year. I signed up my dog as well, cashed in on the book discount. Imagine, mail a load of books and book club mailings came to "Fido, 10 Main Street, Anytown..."
Only problem I had not considered was the junk mail that would follow and there was a lot! It was an interesting experiment since the dog had no other presence in the world outside our home other than the book club. You could not believe the range of businesses that sent mail, the extent to which names and addresses were sold immediately obvious to me.
See if I did something like that, I'd promptly forget and then be like, 'Wait... why are you calling for our dog? Why are you sending our dog mail?' Probably would get them to shut up though. lol.
