Diana Wichtel: Find me a cure for telemarket plague

COMMENT

Who would make a living out of behaving in a way that, studies have revealed, is considered "annoying" by 86 per cent of people? Exactly. You'd have to be a politician or a telemarketer.

I try to be reasonable. I'm not one of those control freaks who put up "No Junk Mail" signs. Junk mail brings out the Zen in me. I embrace it as random, misspelled messages from an otherwise indifferent universe. And then I bin it. Unsolicited mail is a tribute to some useful human instincts - the drive to communicate, to trade goods and services, to find your lost kitty.

And junk mail offers endless opportunities to chart the decline and fall of Western civilisation. All of life is there, from specials on Botox to the latest dire predictions from religious nutters and Winston Peters.

The electronic equivalent, email spam, is less easy to take philosophically. Though you can learn something even from the garbage that jams cyberspace. I've learned that if there are genuine customers out there for even a fraction of the penis enlargements and Viagra on offer, the future of the race looks fairly problematic.

There is nothing to be learned from telemarketers, except how quickly a normally serene individual can be reduced to telecidal fury. I can choose when to go to the mailbox or delete porn from my inbox. I do not choose to do so while in the middle of dinner, Shortland Street or while in the loo, which is when telemarketers inevitably call:

"Hello Mrs Mitch ... Wotch ... Mrs Wichnell. And how are you this evening?"

"Grrrrr."

My partner and I appear in the phonebook under different surnames, so we often get caught twice by the same hucksters. It's bad enough that they ring at all. It's intolerable when they further waste your time getting picky about whom they'll deign to speak to.

"Good evening. And how are you this evening?"

"Grrrr."

"Great! Now, I would like to speak to a person in house who is over 18 and under 55, who earns more than $25,000 a year and who has the next birthday falling on an odd day in a month beginning with J."

By the time I've figured out who in the house is qualified to tell this idiot to

@%* off, the credits are rolling on Shortland Street.

You feel so helpless, especially in this country, where we traditionally carefully observe the ghastly, free-market, let-it-rip mistakes made overseas before doing our best to reproduce them here.

But it seems Americans are mad as hell and aren't going to take it any more. They've long had "do not call" lists in some states - registers on which you can enter your telephone number onto a database that prevents most telemarketers from even thinking about it.

Now there's a national register set up by the Fair Trade Commission. Telemarketers have to update their lists regularly and risk a fine of the equivalent of $19,000 a call. The FTC website could barely cope with the millions signing on in the first few days. Earlier this month, "hundreds of thousands" more were still signing up daily. The FTC can't resolve individual consumer complaints but will investigate erring companies.

Brilliant. Why can't we have that? Perhaps it could be extended to include people you just don't like and nutbags complaining about your latest column.

The nearest we have here is the Direct Marketing Association's oddly-named Telemarketing Preference Service. That gets your number deleted from future campaigns, but only those run by DMA members. And you can't seem to register online. Nothing is ever simple. In the US, headlines such as "Do not call list puts disabled telemarketers out of work" have dampened the universal jubilation.

And several types of organisations remain exempt: charities, pollsters, political campaigns, insurers and companies with which you have a business relationship. Already there are fears about an outbreak of dodgy "charities" and that any business you happen to call might claim a "relationship".

Charities are another matter, a better class of nuisance call. I had one the other night that deserved every penny I coughed up. And, possibly, an Oscar.

"Am I speaking to Mrs Wichtel?"

"Grrrr."

"Great! Diana, I'd just like to thank you. Thanks to your kind and very generous donation last year, Diana, a sick child was able to ... " She was good. She used every trick in the telemarketer's book of dark arts, including the frequent repetition of my name and not letting me get a word in. She was so slick yet sincere and flattering that I ended up donating more than last time. At least it was for a good cause. And tax deductible.

But for mortgage brokers and timeshare hawkers I have no pity. Even if their educated-but-foreign accent leads you to suspect they were a nuclear physicist back home and are only trying to make a buck in this not-always-hospitable land.

Lord knows I try to be civil. Unlike my partner. Before they even get to the inquiries about how his evening is going so far, he cuts them off with a brisk, menace-filled, "No. I don't want to". Click.

An Auckland businessman had an even better idea. He told a company who repeatedly called him that if they called again he'd charge them $100 for his time. They called. He took them to a disputes tribunal and won. Don't get mad, take their money. A national register here would have the wretches thinking twice about who they're calling Mrs Wochnell.

Meanwhile, any mail on how to deal to this modern plague will definitely not be binned. Just please don't phone during Shortland Street.