by
Colin MY COMPUTER TUTOR
Are you getting lots of phonecalls recently? Are you dashing to the phone when it rings, expecting or hoping it to be a friend, member of your family, a prospective or returning client, maybe...?
I pick up my phone and say
"Good morning/afternoon/evening. Colin Rivett here..."and I expect the person who's phoned me to speak. But all too often - and I really mean
far too often - it's an unsolicited call from people who assume that I took out a Payment Protection Insurance policy.
I'm wise to it now. There's always a 4-5 second delay before anyone speaks to you, so usually I put the phone down after 2 seconds. Sometimes it's a recorded message that starts to tell me just how urgent this is....and then I put the phone down. If I'm at my desk in the office it's not too troublesome - 2 seconds is all it takes to decide whether to listen or hang up. But if I'm downstairs doing something else, I tend to dash upstairs to the office when the phone rings because my diary and my notebook are up there and - there's always hope - it might be a client. Imagine my frustration, gentle reader, when it's one of those PPI calls.
That's me with a quizzical look on my face, holding my "legacy" handset. I look pretty frazzled, don't I? And that's a polite way of putting it. Sometimes I feel I should make my upstairs dash worthwhile, so I wait for the agent to speak and then tell him very firmly that I don't have PPI and please remove my number. It makes me feel a little better, but I'm not so naive to think that they won't phone again. The automated messages invite you to press '5' to start making your claim or '9' if you wish to be removed from the database, but I've read so many complaints on Internet forums from people who have tried pressing '9' only to find it makes no difference.
On my BT phone I can use the 1471 service, which tells me the last number to call me. By typing the number into Google (it's best to put a space after the area code) you can find out if there are any references on the Web. In other words, you can see if it's a business number. And Google always returns references from a website called
PhoneNotes which tells you the area/city where the call comes from. You'll see several comments from exasperated people if the number is a PPI agency. The PPI calls seem to come from all round the UK.
And so:
The May Charity
The phone rang...."Good afternoon, Colin Rivett here" and a young man started asking me how I was today. Feeling a bit waspish, I hung on and let him woffle on a bit, expecting it to be PPI. But he said he was phoning from Save the Children and went on to tell me how terrible it was for children in various parts of the world and wouldn't I want to do something about it and....
I gently cut him short and explained that I made a contribution from my business to a different charity every month. I hunted through my records while speaking to him and discovered that I hadn't made a donation to Save The Children, so I thanked him for phoning and said that I would write a cheque and post it with my covering letter to their HQ.
But instead of thanking me he went on, trying to get me to sign up for a direct debit. And that's when I got suspicious! Donations over the phone would mean giving out my debit card details - and I had no guarantee that he was actually phoning on behalf of a bona fide charity.
And the worst thing was: He hadn't said "thank you"!
So I rather curtly stopped him and put the phone down. I made Save The Children my May Charity - I wrote them a cheque and sent it with my usual covering letter. I always describe the circumstances in which the charity was brought to my notice, so I reported the telephone experience I'd just had and gave them the number from which the call had come. (That very useful 1471 service again!)
About a week later I received a thank you letter from the Save The Children office, confirming that the phone number was a bona fide one of theirs. But I'm still surprised about the pushy sales technique.
Oh well, I wasn't going to pursue it any more. I mean, I wouldn't want people to start calling me grumpy!
Colin
