No offense, but...

 ...stop calling me.

Ah the bane of our lives. Telesales.
I will admit there is a small part of me that feels bad for the poor sods who're earning a living cold calling people. You cannot win. There is never a good time to call anyone if you're not a friend or family member. During office hours, we're working (or writing blogs... ya know?) and after hours you're invading our "me time". How very dare you?
So I do try my best to be polite and patient. Honest.

Actually I've even started to feel bad for the "beep-bank" employee on the radio advert who keeps phoning people only to have his fortune read to him by people who already bank with FNB (or is it Nedbank? See I'm not sure if this series of ad's is effective for me anymore).
I think it started out as a brilliant concept, I mean who hasn't had daydreams about messing with that pushy person interrupting your day. It played nicely on schadenfreude for all of us as well.
But now the campaign is in it's 4th or 5th installment and I'm actually really starting to want to give poor Steve a hug! "Be polite you imaginary bastards! Yes your bank is cooler, but Steve's just doing his job. He has to eat!"
When I caught myself yelling this at my radio the other day I had another of those moments where I realize I'm a bit mad.

The telesales problem has continued to spiral more and more out of control for a lot of people and there are some innovative ways I've seen to try and keep your cool when the 3rd call of the day happens:
• Place your phone on counter and walk away to make some coffee.
• Try to sell THEM your couch. And when they say they already have a couch... just say "precisely"
• Start singing
• or the most popular reaction: talk over them saying "no thanks no thanks" and hang up. This has to be done really quickly before your blood has time to heat up at all, let alone begin to boil.

Then again, there's apparently THIS option someone sent me the other day. I haven't signed up yet, but if I do I'll let you know how it goes and I hope you'll let me know as well if you get to it before me.

"The DCM (Don't Contact Me Database) helps you to make sure your address, email address, telephone and cell number are no longer available to organisations, who are members of the DMA, who want to make offers and send information that you do not wish to receive."

You can of course also do this by contacting companies directly and asking them not to contact you... but WHO has that much time to phone so many people... unless of course you're in telesales.