October 31, 2023 at 5:55 pm

This Worker Maliciously Complied With a Persistent Telemarketing Company To Get Them To Leave Them Alone

by Matthew Gilligan

Oh, boy, it’s time for a telemarketing horror story!

We’ve all had to deal with folks like this at some point in our lives and usually all you can do is grin and bear it…

But this person took a different angle!

It all started when they were persistently being bothered by a telemarketing firm…and these folks weren’t the listening kind.

You want a meeting to discuss our phone account? Ok, let’s have a meeting!

“For the past few years our business has been receiving telemarketing calls from an offshore call center trying to make appointments for “Optus Business Centre”. Every time they call, we’d politely tell them we were not interested and to remove us from their list and they’d promise not to call again.

You can probably tell by my use of the words “every time” that having ourselves removed from the list didn’t work. It didn’t work the first time, and it didn’t work the 50th time. Offshore are cheap, and get paid per appointment. So they would get quite aggressive. It was clear that a new strategy needed to be found as it was taking too long to get them to bugger off.

So this person decided the best way to deal with the situation was a combination of malicious compliance and petty revenge.

So began my campaign of malicious compliance/petty revenge…

“Hi we’re calling from Optus business centre and we can save you 40% on your mobile phone bill! Can we come and see you tomorrow at 11am?”

You can save me 40% of my mobile bill? That’s like sixty Grand a month!

“What? How many phones do you have?”

150 or so that I’m responsible for directly, plus a few others..

So it was definitely ON!

The appointment is quickly confirmed. The next day a salesman calls me up he’s running early – can we meet earlier. I refused. Our appointment is for 11 am after all.

11 am rolls around and in he walks – we sit down in reception and go through the greetings. I then ask him if it’s possible to make the telemarketing calls stop now. He assures me that it is, and so I stand up, shake his hand and thank him for coming in.

What? That’s it? You could have said that over the phone!

Seemed easy enough, right?

But we all know that’s not how things usually work…

So they had to explain what was really going on.

I point out that we did. Many times, and it didn’t work – and I hoped that this waste of his time (45 min trip from Homebush to Sydney) would perhaps teach him to mend his ways.

Over the past 2 years they have sent out 5 different reps to see us. They call for meetings – we accept them, shine them on about the value of the account and they roll in to be greeted by me dressed in a chicken suit; made to wait in our meeting room for 20 minutes before being asked to be removed from the list; being turned away at the door (they sent two reps that time).

I’m posting this today because it was visit number 6 and it was the best yet. We got a repeat customer! I sat him down in the meeting room and played the video recording of our last meeting 🙂

And then it was time for some serious heartbreak for a fella who just wouldn’t listen and was trying to pull a fast one.

Is that you ?

Yes! It’s me! Didn’t I follow up ? Did we have a good Meeting?

I point out that I certainly enjoyed our last meeting, and zoomed forward in the video to the part where I explained that we didn’t have 500 mobile accounts – and he needed to please remove us from their list and you could see his heart break.

Which it did again, once he realised that whatever account he thought was being discussed today was not going to be discussed. Which we also have on video, so we can go all inception if/when he shows his face again.”

Check out how people responded.

One person was impressed with this trolling.