Mon 16 July 2007 - Wasting time
Despite having a silent number, and fiercely protecting it, I do get the odd telemarketing call. They are almost all from offshore call centres, and almost all during business hours, when I’m not generally home.
Call centre dialling systems are meant to detect when an answering machine picks up. But evidently their systems think my recorded greeting is a human, and connect the call through to an operator.
So every so often I’ll get home and find messages like these on my answering machine.
phone_messages.mp3 (MP3, 186Kb)
It makes me happy that my answering machine keeps the telemarketers busy for a few seconds on each call. Hopefully lots of others’ machines are doing the same thing, thus preventing them from bothering more people who have the misfortune to be at home when they call.