Dialogue: Lessons in how to shut off those voices in your head

SHELLEY BRIDGEMAN* shares with readers her secrets of dealing with telemarketers and various other telephonic intruders.

We would probably have more patience with telemarketers if they were the only unscheduled disruption to our day. But they must join the queue behind telephone researchers and unsolicited mail.

I know they are just doing their jobs, but it's difficult not to view them as intrusions when you are at home - the one place where you are supposedly safe from the demands of the outside world.

And, of course, the calls invariably come at the most inconvenient time possible.

Comedian Jerry Seinfeld has a novel approach - he tells the caller he will ring them back at home and when the telemarketer says that is not permitted, Jerry replies with something like: "Now you know how I feel. Goodbye."

Another dramatic strategy is to greet the caller with: "Oh thank goodness you've rung. I've had no one to talk to all day and the voices in my head are getting louder. And I think I'm being experimented on by aliens, too. Let me tell you all about it."

Guaranteed to get a hang-up from their end, I'll bet.

My defences to deal with these telephone assaults are a little less exciting. If anyone telephones asking for Mr or Mrs So-and-so, it is obvious they have only a surname, so they take a punt and assume all households contain heterosexuals who are married - and traditional enough to change names and use quaint titles denoting female marital status.

These assumptions are offensive and I always reply to these calls by telling them they have the wrong number.

Anyone asking for Mrs Bridgeman gets the same treatment. Again, the assumptions rankle and I feel like giving them my mother's number since I have never been a Mrs and would not use the title under any circumstances.

Often researchers have mistaken me for a child. My "hello" is then greeted by a kind and patient voice saying: "Could I speak to an adult please?"

This is too tempting for me and I simply pitch my voice even higher and say, "There isn't one here at the moment".

Don't you love the calls that start "Could I speak to someone between the ages of 18 and 45 who is responsible for the household purchase of toilet paper?" Again I always act about 17 1/2 and advise them that Mum and Dad aren't home. Conversation over.

Once a telemarketer asked to speak to the homeowner and I advised her she had the wrong number, which struck me as a more polite response than "No, go away".

And as far as I was concerned she did have the wrong number - wrong in the sense that she had telephoned someone who would never permit an organisation's telemarketing campaign to drive a purchase decision.

In fact, a nuisance call that came when I was in the middle of slicing onions or peeling spuds for dinner would be enough to spur me on to a lifelong boycott of the company concerned.

Anyway the telemarketer repeated, "Homeowner". I repeated, "Wrong number". This went on for a while and she eventually hung up on me. The irony is perversely pleasing.

It was interesting to learn that Telecom sells our telephone numbers to telemarketing companies. If so, surely we should have the opportunity to advise Telecom that we do not want our names sold to all and sundry in that manner. Much like the "No Circulars" letter-box signs, this would cut out most of the unwanted solicitations.

But I guess there is no money in advertising that service.

Do you sometimes wonder where companies get your address? I certainly don't know what made Reader's Digest start plying a Mr S. Bridgeman at my address with promises that he had the chance to win a lot of money.

But I do know that the thick envelopes stopped arriving once I scribbled out the address, wrote "Gone, no address" and mailed it.

That little ploy works wonders in getting you struck off mailing lists. And it is far safer than directly telling the company you don't want its missives any more.

That strategy only confirms two facts you would rather they didn't know - that you do live at that address and that you do respond in some way to their material.

So, ironically, the straightforward approach probably has the effect of making you an even hotter prospect in the marketers' eyes.

I must be on the mailing list of half the shops around town, thanks to all those cheery "Are you on our mailing list?" questions routinely posed by shop attendants each time you make a purchase.

For a while there it bizarrely felt kind of privileged to be invited by some lovely shop to be on its mailing list.

But I'm over that now, so my new policy is to get in first and to ask shop assistants: "Do you have a mailing list?"

After they smile and say "Yes", I reply: "Excellent. Then I am bound to be on it, so please take my name off."

* Shelley Bridgeman is an Auckland writer.