What's the worst job you've ever had?

It's been a while, but there's some clear time wasters - a guy phoning in demanding the police because he had bees in his attic, a dude wanting to phone the police because he didn't like the circus he went to, all sorts of menial bollocks borne out of people unable to manage their own lives. Most of the time, the standing instruction was to pass the call to the requested agency - at the end of the day, we were only listening to a snapshot of what's happening, so we weren't in a position to make a judgement of whether they really needed an ambulance or police attendance or water fairy or not.

The EISEC system used to pick up landline addresses (and sometimes mobile addresses if the mobile operator signed up to the scheme), but also automatically provided public phone box details. There was one phone box serial number that used to strike dread into you, because by the time your eyes set on the number and your neurons were firing thinking "oh no, I recognise that phone box number...", this prolific caller had already started ranting about the new world order, how we're all being led down a path of damnation and that we should repent, all this bollocks. That was one of the few times we could drop calls actually, where they quite clearly weren't listening to us and weren't in any immediate audible need of help or danger.

Some of them were real headscratchers - someone phoning from a landline wanting the coastguard because something had capsized... in Birmingham.

Unfortunately, most of the nonsense calls were a result of an already creaking social care system - people phoning in experiencing severe mental health issues, hallucinating and all sorts; some because they felt like they had nowhere else to turn; and some were just lonely and wanted to speak to someone. I did Operator Assistance calls too (where you dial 100 from a BT landline) and a good chunk of those were old men and women who just wanted someone to speak to. If I was killing time, I'd quite happily chat shit to them for five minutes, on the understanding that as soon as the dot matrix board showed a 999 call queued, they were yeeted and the emergency call was taken.

I learned a lot about the world, myself, and how to speak to folk to get what you want in the world without being a complete penispump to someone on the other end of the phone.

Sorry about the long post.

What is an AK? I'm guessing not something to do with guns in this context.

I mean, I was good with people hanging up during the spiel. Saying "sorry I'm not interested" is more than fine and likely to put you on the upper end of calls that's day. Swearing or getting upset isn't acceptable and fails to recognise that neither of you want to be on that call.

However telemarketing has a better response rate than paper based surveys, and the data is used to drive decision making. A lot of people complain when things don't work out for you - like local council decisions on new amenities, but if you don't submit your opinion you can't be heard. It's not perfect but it is used to define a surprising number of things.

Wrt to you MIL, yeah, it's not nice to be on the recieving end of hostility, I get it can be annoying but as I implied above nobody chooses the job, I personally had to take whatever I could get and I was too young/not out of work long enough for JSA (plus JSA is a pain to get anyway, but that's a whole different story).

"Please take my number off your list." and hang up. Any company that follows the OFCOM rules is obliged to honour verbal requests for removal, so that's the correct thing to do.

Admittedly, a cold calling company that follows the rules is an oxymoron so I tend to just cut them off with a "for fuck sake", hang up, Google the number out of sheer curiosity, and then add it to the block list. Every now and then I see a number in the call history that's been auto-blocked, so that at least provides a little satisfaction.

Or there's the Google call screening thing, though legitimate callers find it confusing and often hang up before you get chance to take over the call, or assume it's voicemail and try to leave a message.

In respect to 1) you're absolutely correct, that should be two sentences and not the horrible run-on that I created.

In response to 2), yes I can understand being wary of spam callers, there weren't nearly as many 15 years ago when I was doing the job. It was targeted research, so people who'd opted in to being contacted for marketing purposes ("how is your new toaster working out for you") or local authority requests for comment ("are you happy with the new park that opened").

I've had some real howlers the other way though (with actual scammers) so I understand the frustration, one woman who was obviously a spam PPE caller yelled at me "don't you like money!" after I had politely declined,and there's no dealing with that. In the end the easiest thing to do and a definite improvement on being nasty, is just hang up, in my opinion.

Hyphen or semicolon or full-stop here, not comma.

"sorry, I'm not interested" and hanging up is fine, cursing my family and telling me what a PoS I am, not so much. I think it's clear you've never had to work in the service industry if you think that working a job like this dehumanizes you and justifies rudeness of this scale.

I never yell at these people but I will often hang up on them after the first “sorry not interest” gets ignored.

Nah. Here's the rules:

1. don't yell so they have an excuse to hang up
2. ask them to repeat things, and parts of things, and more things, as some sweatshops have rules that say the customer must understand the pitch before they can be hooked legally.
3. never say yes
4. never hang up; let them
5. question everything
6. remember not to give out ANY personal information - not even confirming they have the number they think they dialed - until they can concretely prove whom they are. (This is a bailout for legit organizations that call you and accidentally sound like scam calls. They should immediately ask you to look up their 800 number and call a given extension within that publicly-advertised phone tree to somewhat confirm their identity)
7. now the game is on. Your goal is to rack up the minutes they spend on you. With enough players, it finally becomes a losing proposition to run a phone sales/scam organization; but it's gotta be a lot of people.

My record is 75 minutes with a 'Bell Atlantic' rep who was fluid with details and gave me an edge to contrast the data-points, and who finally hung up claiming she wanted to validate my information, Mr Thomas, to which I replied "Thomas, who the hell is that?" before the line went dead. I loved rocking out phrases like "well are you lying now or were you lying then?" I sometimes hope she took a different job the next day and hope she's seen success. My name isn't Thomas.

I think you may misunderstand what I did. It was reaching out to people who had opted in to be part of market research. If they said "don't contact me again" or if they were hostile then they got on the "no-call" list and were never contacted again. The only way that we could have got their phone number is if they submitted it during some sort of sign-up process somewhere. So I think you might be equating the work I did with something else.

The "cold" part of the "cold-calling" I mentioned above was because they weren't explicitly expecting the call, but they had somewhere signed up and agreed to be contacted.

Refusing to take work is a rather privileged position, not everyone has that luxury, and I didn't at the time. That being said I was out of there as quick as I could find something else (I only did 2 weeks).