Potential Spam. Unknown Caller. Unknown City and State I have no connection to.

None of these calls are from anyone I want to talk with. Unfailingly, I block, ignore or send them straight to voicemail. And I am constantly in search of ways to stop such calls from ringing me in the first place. The interruption is annoying. How did my number get on these call lists? Is there a way to prevent it? I wish I knew.

There’s a phone scam I heard of recently where the poor soul who answers is told they missed a jury duty appointment and if they don’t want an officer at their door to take them to jury duty fail jail, they can settle up on the phone, either providing a credit card number or purchasing gift cards and sending the barcodes. Sounds absurd? It is, but people have fallen for it.

Like the grandparents a few years back who got the call from their grandchild who was in jail and they needed a credit card number to get them out of lock up. It must have worked, because that one lasted a long time.

Then there are the telemarketers trying to get your donation for the police or firefighter benevolent organization, or a political party or a cause, like gun control or getting rid of lobbyists or some social concern, or cancer research. If you ask them to email you more information, most of them can’t. There’s your queue to hang up. I feel bad for the people who take those telemarketing jobs. Why is that even a thing anymore?

Forty-or-so years ago I worked with a company whose primary source of new customers was through telemarketing. This was before cell phones, when most phone communication was a landline in your kitchen or your office. The people I would see in passing who worked as telemarketers were considered “senior employees” if they lasted more than 60 days. I think the longest I knew of anyone working there was 6 months, but the majority were gone in 90 days or less. The call station was a revolving door of new people coming in with their bright smiles and optimistic outlooks, and leaving sad and frustrated and downcast. They spent 8 hours a day getting hung up on constantly, getting a sale infrequently. It was deflating work.

How is this still a viable way to raise money or scam people? If it was terrible 40 years ago, why are we still doing it? From what I understand, today the actual dialing is automated so the telemarketers/scammers aren’t subject to as much getting hung up on or yelled at, but still, how is there viable success in telephone marketing?

Telephone sales has all but disappeared, except for the recent surgency of calls asking if you are interested in selling your house. That can’t be too successful. If I were going to sell my house, it certainly wouldn’t be through some random phone solicitation.

The calls I’m writing about also are not to be confused with call center, customer service centers. That’s a whole other topic for a whole other post. I’m referring to the cold calls that interrupt your daily flow to ask for money, or to scam you. It just seems so unproductive.

Social media and email inboxes, television and various free apps provide more than enough opportunity to market. There is no need to use telephone marketing anymore. For the life of me, I don’t understand why it still is happening. It had negative reaction 40 years ago. It was still annoying when answering machines came along and you reviewed your messages to find telemarketer messages. Did anyone ever call back a telemarketer back in the day? I think it was rare.

Our society has made so many advances in technology and yet we hold on to this archaic method. Get rid of telephone soliciting. It can’t be working. Stop employing people and breaking their spirits while annoying the people on the other end of the call.

That’s what I think.