In America, when there is a perceived problem, the government tries to jump in and legislate it away. With the scourge of telemarketing abusing the phone system, in the government’s infinity wisdom, they created the Do Not Call Registry. Instead of stopping telemarketers from calling your home, it just increases the cost of doing business for legitimate firms, and the rogue firms just figure out ways around the system.
What a lot of people of resorted to do to avoid telemarketing calls, is to get an unlisted telephone number, and purchase caller-id from their phone company. The idea is that if you don’t recognize the phone number, or if it is market anonymous, you would not answer the phone. That may help you out for now, but eventually, the telemarketers will get to you.
A better solution (and the one I’m pitching here) is a game I came up with that you can play with your kids, called the Telemarketer Bottleneck Game (TBG for short). They idea of the game is simple. When a phone call comes in from what looks like a telemarketing call, let one of the kids answer the phone. The game starts as soon the phone is answered, and the objective is to keep a human on the line for as long as possible, with minimal time on the phone by the kids. The idea is for your child to tell the telemarketer that they will get mommy (or daddy) and to please hold while they get their parent. What works best is a phone with a hold feature, and some sort of Hold indicator light on the phone. Try keeping the flashing hold light on for as long as possible, and the game is over once the light goes out. The total time on hold is your kid’s score, and the best score for the week (and/or month) will win some sort of prize. Kids are allowed to pick up the phone occasionally (even encouraged) and “play dumb” tell the telemarketer that they will go and get their parent (again). Tag teaming the telemarketer using other kids tends to keep the game going even longer.
What’s the purpose of this game (besides laughing at the crazy person on the other end waiting on hold)? Well, the most expensive and limiting resources for telemarketers are the actually humans on the other end of your call. The actual cost of the call, or the computer systems is peanuts compared to the people. By tying up a very valuable resource, you are in effect limiting how many people the telemarketing firm can effectively call an hour. The longer they are on hold, the less time they can actually spend on other calls. Eventually, if enough people play along, the cost of telemarketing becomes greater then the benefits and that will end yet another telemarketing campaign. Our families average score, 5 minutes, with about 20 minutes as the best score.
Caveats:
- Train your kids to know the tell-tale signs of telemarketer call, the click and then delay before a real person replies (while the firm’s computer’s routes your call to a human) and always be around to monitor the situation.
- Kids shouldn’t play this game without approval of their parents
- This game doesn’t scale well to cell phones, since you may be paying for your air-time.
- If you tie up your line too much, then you will not be able to get phone calls, which is a limited factor on playing the game. But like any good games, it gets boring if you play all the time.