A view from the Dark Side
Hello Ladies & Gentlemen. I am one of you who is also one of them.
One of "Satan's little helpers" as Bill Hicks described us (Damm I miss the big guy).
Over the last decade and a half I have worked for many of the largest hardware and software companies or their resellers. I may have spoken to you, although when you're calling on 3 different projects into the same company (and possibly talking to the same person) whatever name I gave you was not mine, even if you were a Group IT Director (as some of them were).
I've enjoyed the challenge, the pay's regular and the out of hours socializing can be a lot of fun although my memories of them are a bit hazy. There's a sitcom to be had in this business that would make the antics of the IT crowd seem completely normal by comparison. I always fancied seeing a company being headed by Steve Coogan's "Super salesman" Gareth Cheeseman with regular movie references to films like Glengarry, Glennross, Pulp Fiction and Deliverance (Ah PSB humour. Nothing quite like it).
99% of my work has been calling into businesses, with a more recent job calling people at home. You might feel the difference is like <grossly offensive simile redacted> but the difference is between night and day.
The company I worked for used a Cisco VoIP system that crashed about once a week. Despite people views TPS requests were programmed into it and the number barred. However they still ended up on our paper listing (1 PC in the whole office) as they could not work out how to not print them out in the first place. When the branch office was shut down by the Police I decided that 6 day weeks in the company of some borderline sociopaths was not the highest achievement in life to aspire to.
This is neither a call for mercy or a confession. As a method of finding specific potential customers for fairly specialised products and services it is a very cost effective method.
Personally I have lived in the same place and had very few cold callers at home. I'm not on TPS but I've always been ex-directory and normal caller ID is disabled. I am very careful when I leave a phone number. Mostly it's been people I already do business with.
I quite like the American fellow who'd started taking people to court saying they were making unauthorized use of his phone line for their business and he was going to charge them. He'd lost twice in court but the judge said of the second time that' someone had called him at home and if was in front of the judge again things might go his way next time. Always wondered what happened next.
Black choppers because I don't feel too much love here.