Andy Rooney's Tips for Handling Telemarketers

Three Little Words That Work !!
(1)The three little words are: "Hold On, Please..."
Saying this, while putting down your phone and walking off
(instead of hanging-up immediately) would make each telemarketing
call so much more time-consuming that boiler room sales would grind to a halt.
Then when you eventually hear the phone company's "beep-beep-beep"
tone, you know it's time to go back and hang up your handset, which has
efficiently completed its task.

These three little words will help eliminate telephone soliciting.
(2) Do you ever get those annoying phone calls with no one on the
other end? This is a telemarketing technique where a machine makes phone
calls and records the time of day when a person answers the phone.
This technique is used to determine the best time of day for a "real"
sales person to call back and get someone at home.
What you can do after answering, if you notice there is no one
there, is to immediately start hitting your # button on the phone, 6 or 7 times,
as quickly as possible This confuses the machine that dialed the call and
it kicks your number out of their system. Gosh, what a shame not to
have your name in their system any longer !!!

(3) Junk Mail Help:
When you get "ads" enclosed with your phone or utility bill,
return these "ads" with your payment. Let the sending companies throw their own
junk mail away.

When you get those "pre-approved" letters in the mail for
everything from credit cards to 2nd mortgages and similar type junk, do not throw
away the return envelope. Most of these come with postage-paid return envelopes, right? It
costs them more than the regular 37 cents postage "IF" and when they receive
them back. It costs them nothing if you throw them away! The postage was
around 50 cents before the last increase and it is according to the weight.
In that case, why not get rid of some of your other junk mail and put it
in these cool little, postage-paid return envelopes.

One of Andy Rooney's (60 minutes) ideas.
Send an ad for your local chimney cleaner to American Express. Send a pizza
coupon to Citibank. If you didn't get anything else that day, then
just send them their blank application back! If you want to remain anonymous, just make sure your name isnt on anything you send them. You can even send the envelope back empty if you want to just to keep them guessing! It still costs them 37 cents.

The banks and credit card companies are currently getting a lot of their own
junk back in the mail, but folks, we need to OVERWHELM them. Let's let
them know what it's like to get lots of junk mail, and best of all
they're paying for it...Twice!
Let's help keep our postal service busy since they are saying that
e-mail is cutting into their business profits, and that's why they need to
increase postage costs again. You get the idea !

If enough people follow these tips, it will work!