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Let's enforce the law to silence cellphone pests

Dear Funeral and Life Policy Company,

THIS is, I think, the sixth or seventh time you have called me on my cellphone. Your calls have been coming thick and fast for the past three weeks now – you must really care! (Lol.)

Congratulations on being a step ahead of your competitors in the Seriously Annoying Marketing stakes – instead of putting some poor benighted and underpaid soul on the phone with a script and instructions to sound cheerful (I don’t care what you pay, it cannot be enough for that job), you use a recorded voice that keeps going no matter how many f-words you fling at it.

What this means, of course, is that the lucky recipient of your call has but two options: 1) terminate the call – tried that, but realised when you called again so soon that, like all stalkers, you weren’t going to just go away; 2) wait out the call until you reach the opt-out provision – press nine. Yay. I pressed nine with enthusiasm.

A couple of days passed; perhaps you were nursing a powerful rejection hangover. Then you called again. This time, I tried a different tactic – I asked for a consultant to call me. He wasn’t very pleased when he did, the very next day, because I said to him, politely and pleasantly, that I was sorry to have given him false hope, but I only wanted him to call so I could ask him if he could very kindly tell Marketing to scrub my cell number from their list. Sounding just a trifle grumpy, he promised to do so.

Imagine my surprise when you called AGAIN, FLPC! I thought, whoa, maybe bad news travels slowly; maybe marketing just hasn’t received the message yet. So I repeated the procedure: press one to have a consultant call me. Rinse and repeat. Very proud of me for being polite about it all.

And a few days later, guess what? You called again! This time I tried the opt out option – hope springs eternal and all that. And golly, it seemed to work. I didn’t hear a thing from you for quite a big chunk of time.

Which meant that, when your next call came, I had no excuses to mutter on your behalf. You had had plenty of time to allow my official opt-out rejection to sink in; by now you’d surely have paid attention had your disappointed ‘consultants’ passed the message on to marketing.

So, with a deep feeling of dread rising in my chest, I found your head office phone number and called.

Have you ever tried to call your own number, FLPC? Odds are you haven’t. Because then you’d realise that your ‘switchboard’ doesn’t exist. (Perhaps all your technology is instructed to ignore any attempt by poor unfortunate souls to ‘press nine’?)

On one call I got put through to Policy Administration, but when I explained that I wanted to speak to Marketing, or, if that failed, your CEO, the woman put me on hold – permanently.

So I decided to follow the automated underground tunnels to Legal. I got to speak to someone who said he was an actual lawyer. We had an actual conversation. A somewhat puzzled one, on his part, as he was expecting to deal with queries about wills and the Master of the Supreme Court and such, but eventually he went off to consult some wise superior about my dilemma.

When he came back, he asked for my deets – name and phone number. “Oh no,” said I. “If I do that, you’ll never get back to me.”

But he dug in his heels. It was cough up or no dice. So I did, laughing hollowly. “I’ll be counting the hours!” I said. And I have. All of them. Like sheep in an insomniac’s imagination, tirelessly jumping fences in an endless stream, the hours have ticked past one by one without a word. Everything’s got to be on your terms, right, FLPC? When I WANT you to call, it’s all flounce and cold-shoulder, isn’t it?

Of course I could just go on forever cutting the connection every time you call – just as I politely say to cold callers, “I don’t have time for this now, thank you, goodbye,” at least twice a day. But it is intrusive. I am a writer – every call stands a good chance of finding me nose down on the trail of some research, or worse, revelling in one of those wonderful occasions when the words flow like honey.

Interrupt me and it takes a good five or ten minutes – sometimes more – to ‘find my place’ again, as it were. (I am sure the same dynamic applies to people in other fields, too.) And that makes it bad marketing. Do you think I love you now? Not bloody likely. It’s harassment, plain and simple.

Let’s have full implementation – and enforcement – of the Protection of Personal Information Act now, I say. “Section 69 of the POPIA places significant limitations on the circumstances in which a party may engage in direct marketing by means of unsolicited communications by requiring individuals to have either consented to the use of their personal information (opt-in) or for there to be an existing relationship between the parties. An existing relationship between the parties is itself subject to additional limitations and does not result in a freedom to make repeated advances.”

Bring it on!

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