Telemarketing and Interruptions

Posted on January 7, 2010 · Posted in Impact and Symptoms

Telemarketers are one of the annoyances we all live with, and contribute their part to the overall flow of interruptions that it damaging our ability to concentrate on what we want to do. I find it interesting that these days, at any rate here in Israel, these rascals are following in the footsteps of our work-related information overload into the evening hours.

Today I got two calls in my evening – one from a  car rental company stating its desire to improve its service to me (actually, they simply wanted to verify my contact information) and one from a health provider whom I cut short before learning what they wanted. The first came at 7:12 PM; the second well after 8:00 PM. Someone was paying the poor agents doing these calls to work an after-work-hours shift so they could annoy me in my own after-hours time.

Many of us are used to take this kind of intrusion from our peers at work, unfortunately; but for our service providers to send total strangers to obliterate our private time really takes nerve. And why are they doing this? Obviously, because they figure that’s when they can find us at home, at our listed numbers that they dredge up from the white pages. It makes perfect sense – once society accepts that there is no such thing as a sacrosanct personal time. As our society, the world over, has done… 🙁