My heart bleeds for cold-callers — it must be the most depressing job in the world
It’s always happening. It happened again last Friday. I had finished my Times column for Saturday and, taking advantage of the two hours left of daylight, fetched the wheelbarrow, pick and spade and set to work finishing the construction of a stone table outside our house in Derbyshire. But hardly had I started work than from inside the house I heard the telephone ring. Downing tools, running up from the garden, shedding gloves and kicking off boots I reached it, breathless but just in time.
‘Good afternoon, have you thought about a new kitchen? Our company would be happy to visit free of charge and give you a quote...’.
I cut him short as I’ve learned to — the earlier you interrupt the flow the easier it is terminate these conversations, wasting less time on both sides — and, fighting my irritation, communicated more or less courteously my longstanding, unyielding, implacable, unalterable resolve not to have a new fitted kitchen, or a fitted kitchen at all. He took the news without arguing and I hung up and went back to my work.
But I could hear the disappointment in his voice. He sounded young and (from the timbre and something in the accent) probably black. As anger at the small but futile and uninvited interruption to my life subsides I’m always glad to have managed not to be unpleasant. But every time it happens again (on this occasion it happened again only an hour later: an offer of a different broadband telephone package) the instinct to snap at someone wells up anew inside me, and has to be suppressed anew. One learns to stifle the expression, but never the feeling, of annoyance.
And, no, this is not a bleat about the irritations of the age of telecommunication. Cold-calling by phone is only the modern equivalent of the door-to-door peddler, or brush or encyclopaedia salesman. I can just about remember these people beating a path daily to my mother’s door, and they were every bit as big a nuisance as unsolicited telephone callers, and harder to dispatch. Every age has its own mode of sleeve-tugging, and it would not surprise me if the proportion of our waking hours spent brushing aside attempts to attract our attention to one product or another on offer has remained remarkable constant over the millennia. So, I expect, has the annoyance. After the annoyance, however (and as I was getting togged up for my stone table construction again) came a slight but distinct depression. It always comes. I feel sorry to have disappointed someone. I feel sorry for the people who have to make these unsolicited calls for a living. They often sound uneducated, and rarely display the animal enthusiasm of the natural salesman. No doubt they’re paid rock-bottom wages, and have perhaps been tempted into the job by promises of fat commissions on successful sales which never materialise; but at least they’re trying, and I bet they have financial worries of their own to plague them.
Sometimes at dinner parties one hears people joking about how they’ve managed to bait or nettle a cold-calling telephone salesman. ‘Oh, I always say, “Yes, I’m very interested in a new fitted kitchen — maybe we can arrange something — but hold on just a tick: there’s someone at the door...” and then I leave the telephone off the hook until after about ten minutes they hang up, having wasted all that valuable selling-time, ha-ha-ha.’ Very funny. But just imagine (and does a single Spectator reader have to do this for a living?) the awfulness of waking up every Monday with the prospect ahead of a whole week of trying to sell something pointless that nobody wants, and being at best rebuffed and at worst insulted on the telephone, and all for a pitiful wage. You might start off feeling confident, but with each refusal your confidence would sink, and the less confident you sounded the less chance you’d have of ever making a sale.
Your whole employment would consist in bringing out the nasty and irritable side in a random series of strangers, all day. And think how bad you’d feel after you’d dragged to the phone some frail-sounding old lady living on her own and heard at first in her voice the pleasure of receiving a telephone call, and then the dawning disappointment as she realised it was only another salesman.
Of course there do exist thick-skinned individuals who would care nothing for the feelings of those they called, and cheerfully brush off every rebuff. And there are people so clever at persuading others to part with their money that a reliable harvest of hits would compensate for the inevitable misses. There might even be cold-calling salesmen with a product to sell which they genuinely believe in and can honestly recommend. But it’s in the nature of cold-calling that the product is not attractive enough to sell itself and potential customers have to be tricked or badgered into buying it; and it’s in the nature of this sector of the economy that salesmen will be recruited, not according to the persuasiveness of their telephone manner, but their desperation for work.
Three baleful components therefore conspire to create the moment when you’re busy doing something else, and the phone rings. The first is a product for sale which you do not want. The second is a struggling human being with no talent for salesmanship. The third — you — is a person who has not chosen to be approached and does not wish to buy. The outcome is failure: failure to make a sale. There thus occurs a brief, minor but perfect vortex of unhappiness: 60 seconds or less in which two people who do not know each other intersect, leaving one irritated, the other disappointed, and both with their spirits slightly lowered.
My late grandfather, in some ways an unworldly man, bought a hand-made wooden ladder from a carpenter selling his handiwork door to door. ‘He hadn’t made a single sale all month,’ he told my grandmother, who had scolded him because they already had two ladders, ‘and said nobody was buying wooden ladders any more because massproduced iron ones had become cheaper. So I bought one to encourage him. Look, it’s beautifully made.’ One day, perhaps, when I grow old and mad, I’ll buy a fitted kitchen over the telephone, just to cheer someone up.
Matthew Parris is a columnist for the Times.
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