Lost in transit

I just need a minute of your time...

Australia – land of sunshine, surfboards, kangaroos and … direct marketing. Not a single week goes by without some sort of telemarketing call at home, or, since spring arrived, door-to-door salespeople ringing the bell.

Some weeks I get at least one telemarketing call every day; they're easily identifiable as soon as you pick up the handset by the silent pause followed by a quiet click as the line goes through to the service rep. Half the time they ask for someone I've never heard of ("Yes, I am absolutely sure there's no Karen Harrison who lives here, honestly"), and every time I politely ask them to take my name off their list before saying goodbye and hanging up. Unfortunately, the "Do Not Call " registry they're setting up here won't debut until next year some time.

Maybe it's because I grew up in apartment buildings in Manhattan, where either a doorman or a buzzer stood guard – and this is the point where my housemate says I sound like a provincial New Yorker – but people soliciting or selling door-to-door has always seemed unbelievably quaint to me; I'd imagine an earnest young salesman, hat in hand, asking a suburban housewife, cookie-battered-spatula in hand, for just a minute of her time to show her this really fantastic set of encyclopedias or the world's best vacuum cleaner.

The reality is a lot less charming, I've learned. Just last week I had to answer the door to World Vision on Wednesday, an electric company on Thursday, and a pair of Jehovah's Witnesses on Friday. Feeling like my privacy at home has been violated certainly doesn't put me in the frame of mind to consider a sales pitch, and when they launch breathlessly into their spiel, designed with those faux-Socratic-method questions meant to make you realise that you'd just have to be crazy not to want to save over 15% per month on your gas bill, I feel my "hard-sell" detector needle hitting red. I've learned to politely and firmly cut them off with a "I'm really not interested, but thank you, take care, good bye" before I shut the door.

I should have really invited the Jehovah's Witnesses in for my daily Satanic baby-sacrifice ritual, though. Oh well, next time.

Posted by wildsoda at November 21, 2006 11:53 AM