Eggstra special, pun intended
A late Easter egg for you this week: a cold caller special edition of Backbytes. If any of you want to test our reader remedies for the curse of unwanted callers, then please report back.
Cold confusion
“On one occasion we got so fed up with one company calling we said to the errant salesperson: ‘Sorry, we are a bit busy at the moment – we have the receivers in’,” suggests Phil Geeson. “Needless to say we did not hear from them again.” The caller may have been confused, because Phil works at the University of Cambridge.
Who do you think you are talking to?
Chris Wheatley was often on call for an NHS intensive care unit, and so had an unlisted number. When it rang, he knew there was a serious problem with a patient – or that a random number dialler had found him and he was stuck on the phone with a cold caller. “This is a government unlisted number – who are you and how did you get this number?” he would ask in his official voice, and then pretend to take their details for further investigation. Which has, he promises, proved very effective.
Intruder calling...
“I’ve found a great response to the old ‘Are you the owner of the property?’ type sales calls to be ‘No – I’m a squatter’. This invariably leads to an interesting silence,” is the suggestion of Trevor Burch at Purite.
Dial M for murder
Mark Humphrys at Norwich School of Art & Design tells his callers that the security policy based on British Standard 7799 means he is unable to speak to them, or – for those long afternoons after a lunchtime visit to the pub – he would recruit an assistant. “A blood curdling scream in the background, I shout, ‘Oh my god, he’s got an axe…’ and then the phone goes dead.”
Use, abuse and then amuse
If you have time on your hands, use telephone salespeople for your amusement. Roger Kay gives his mate Terry the credit for an amusing way to mess with the heads of callers who want you to take both electricity and gas from the same supplier. “Rant about how dangerous it must be to have gas and electricity in the same pipes,” he suggests.
Sweet nothings
Alternatively for those with speaker phones, “play the strange word game,” suggests Sam Mackenzie. “Someone specifies a word that would be hard to use in everyday conversation; you have to guide the conversation so that you can slip in the phrase.”
Match made in the yellow pages
“I keep a number of my favourite double glazing firms in my telephone memory,” says Mike Casey at BAE Systems. He can then forward one salesperson to another, because – let’s face it – they deserve each other. “I wonder what they talk about?” he asks. We’re sure it must be fascinating.
Grave mistake
And finally, a warning. “My father picked up the phone to a cold caller who asked to speak to his wife,” says Rachel Peacock at UKIP Media & Events. “My Dad replied: ‘Sorry, I have buried her under the patio,’ and put the phone down. A little while later there was a knock at the door, and to my mother’s horror it was the police. They had come to check whether she was, in fact, under the patio.” Rachel’s father had given a convincing impersonation of a crazed murderer and the caller had alerted the police – who decided, on balance, that Rachel’s dad should escape with a warning.
Seeing clearly?
Our series on the great work at the cutting edge of science takes us to the University School of Information Science and Technology, where lost key emergencies will soon be a thing of the past. The Daily Telegraph reveals that Professor Yasuo Kuniyoshi has created a pair of glasses that remembers what you’ve looked at.
Ask your glasses where you left your car keys, and they will search their visual memory to find where and when you saw them.
“In the future, the glasses will be more intelligent than the wearer,” the professor reveals. If Prof Kuniyoshi’s glasses are so clever, maybe they can drive the kids to school.
Like English – but not at all
We are always keen to learn new languages, and Andy Bayley at Dawsons seems to have found one while looking for a copy of Opera to download.
“I clicked a sponsored link on Tucows and got this: www.operasoft.info/uk,” he says. While the page seems to offer the download in question, we can’t be sure, because: “It operates is one of the navigators more popular than it has in Internet, and that one stands out by complete it of its benefits.”
Once you have finished rearranging those words to complete a well-known phrase or sentence, you will be ready to discover features such as: “Possibility of adding motors search with only going us to the field search of a Web”, “kept from sessions,” and “previous Vista of the contents of each eyelash with only positioning to us raises.”
We could not have said it better ourselves.
Robot wars
In our occasional series on the UK’s efforts to build a robot to regain the lead in the technology race that it last held when we created the teasmade, we go to the University of Plymouth, to discover a project led by
Angelo Cangelosi, professor in artificial intelligence.
The project aims to teach the 1m-high iCub to speak using a project called iTalk. “The plan is to teach the
robot to speak by employing the same methods used by parents to teach their children,” says the university’s web site.
“Typical experiments with the iCub robot will include activities such as inserting objects of various shapes into the corresponding holes in a box, serialising nested cups and stacking wooden blocks. Next, the iCub will be asked to name objects and actions so that it acquires basic phrases such as ‘robot puts stick on cube’.”
We look forward to stage two of the project, where the iCub learns to send texts (“putN a stik on a cube S
realy borin”), hides the stick because it knows that really irritates Prof Cangelosi, and finally learns to make him a cup of tea.
Talk to yourself
We have more ways to get rid of telephone salespeople. Phil Nicholson at Tomy UK waits for callers at work to ask, “Don’t you want to save your company money?” so that he can reply: “No, I hate it here. I hope they waste all their money.”
“Ask which company they are from, then put them on hold, explaining you will connect them to the correct department,” says Vince Elgey. “While they are on hold, Google their company name and find a contact number, dial that number, and transfer them to it.
“Imagine their bewilderment when they try to sell their product to their own company.”
For all you Unix fans, Paul Warren at DecisionSoft has a company policy. Sales callers are requested to
contact a Mr David Evnull.
“I have just got off the phone from such a caller. As previously instructed, they had been trying to contact David Evnull by telephone, but he never seems to return their calls,” he says. “They wanted his email address, and I was more than happy to oblige: ‘That’s d-e-v-n-u-l-l at…’.”
For those of you who don’t understand, apparently it’s some kind of Unix joke.
Great balls of fun
Those of you who consider the PS3 to be a bit too small, and who have a lot of space in their bedroom, might like the Virtusphere.
It is designed for those of us who find real life acceptable, but a bit short on monsters to zap and might want to spend £15,000 on this large hollow ball designed to project rolling virtual reality environments. As the Seattle Times says, it is “like a spinning hamster wheel”.
Our fashion correspondent notes that while a lycra bodysuit does not necessarily add to your enjoyment of the game you are playing, it certainly adds to the fun people have while they are outside it looking in.
Dead letterbox
“Thought you would enjoy this email about a BT Tradespace competition,” says Chris Meacher.
“I particularly liked the bit where it says: A list of prize winners may be obtained by written request,” he adds, “by sending an SAE to shopping@bttradespace.com on or before 23 April 2008.” You must have to scan it first..
The writing is on the toilet wall
“I am completing a specification for an intranet today and the following is included in the specifications list,” says Joe, who does not want us to reveal his last name.
“A blogging component. It will appear on screen as ‘Blog roll’ and look like a toilet roll on a holder (with perforated lines) and one blog teaser per sheet. The blog will probably start off being specifically for a few members of staff, but then may expand and include guest writers.”
“Not sure what this says about what they think of either their readers or their blog writers,” Joe says.
We could hazard a guess, and from our experience of blogs it is probably not too wide of the mark.
Code breaking for sales callers
More tips to get rid of sales callers. “I used to do the indefinite hold trick, and others, but they just call again and it got boring after a while. I thought of another way to frustrate them that also seems to get them off your back,” says Tony Halsall at Skipton Building Society.
“I ignore every question they ask and respond by asking for their authorisation code. They do not understand, of course, but whatever they ask next, I tell them that I cannot help without an authorisation code. Most give up at that point, but if they persevere, I just ask again for their code.
“Evidently they conclude – sooner or later – that they have called a business line, which I believe gets the number off their lists.”
If you have Tony on your list, take note of the potential flaw in his argument: “I am still waiting for one of them to conjure up a code; will I tell them that it is not valid or just hang up?”
Confucius say: type right
If you are not getting the opportunities you think you deserve, you might want to look more carefully at your CV. “I had a young candidate who listed among his interests that he was an ‘expert in the marital arts’,” says Peter O’Sullivan at Bang Communications.
“Obviously I was not threatened, but the women in the office were a bit let down that he was not invited for interview.”
Maybe he should look at a different specialisation.
Work can be fatal
At least we can laugh at ourselves. Well, you can anyway. “A fair while ago I was looking for a job and used the same bits of my cover letter over and over again,” says Tom Knight, who eventually fetched up at University College London.
“A pity really, because I found that a number of companies received a letter ending with ‘I hope you will consider me for this poison.’” Strangely, at least two of these firms asked me to attend an interview and a third even let me get as far as being one of the two final candidates.”
In a dark corner somewhere
“The television trailers for the film Untraceable claim that in ‘a dark corner’ of the internet, there is an ‘untraceable’ web site,” writes Antony Hawkins from the University of Sheffield.
“Then it gives the web address: www.killwithme.co.uk.” You can sort of see where this is going, can’t you?
“Ignoring questions about whether or not the internet has physical attributes, such as corners, a couple of minute’s work indicates that the site is registered to Magnet Harlequin, whose offices are on an industrial estate in Uxbridge, on behalf of Working Title Films. Should be something for the FBI there.”
Just in case anyone from the FBI is reading this, and for all of you who watched the Bourne films, you know that – in a secret control room somewhere – we have just flashed up on a screen. Here is a map of the internet’s untraceable dark corner: www.tinyurl.com/ 3ahqyu.
The price of a phone call
For those of you who have been amused by BT’s attempts to keep us informed about the cost of a call to the US, we would just like to close this one off by offering you – at the suggestion of Alan Johnston – the link to MoneySavingExpert’s price comparisons of the cost of US calls.
“Not only will it find companies that are cheaper than BT, but the URL is a lot shorter too,” he says. Strangely, BT does not carry a link to this on its web site, or maybe that is because the quoted BT price of 15p per minute is 37.5 times the cheapest quoted rate.
Clean up? More like a wipeout
“Can we trust the disk clean-up application?” asked Raj Patel last week.
Peter Young has an answer: “I recently upgraded my ‘Vista Ready’ Toshiba from XP Pro to Vista and noticed after a week or so that I had lost 6GB of hard-disk space. I ran disk cleanup, which miraculously retrieved 80GB of disk space from a 100GB disk.”
On rebooting, Peter discovered that the clean up has managed to remove most of Vista. It only took a week for him to reinstall XP and his old applications. That’s what you call spring cleaning.
The joys of being a silent partner?
We are still receiving tips for getting rid of salespeople. In a few weeks we will immortalise the best in one of our newsletters.
Robin Hall has a tip for female readers: “A friend discovered a useful technique when she answered the telephone one evening at the house of the man who is now her husband.
“On being informed that Mr Perkins was out, she was asked if she might be Mrs Perkins. The caller hung up immediately when she replied: ‘Goodness me no, I’m just his bit on the side’.”
Both Robin and her friend report that this is 100 per cent successful: “Clearly mistresses are considered to have no influence over the purchase of double-glazing, insurance or magazine subscriptions.”
Anita Curtis has another tip for avoiding unwanted sales calls. “When the salespeople ask for my elderly father by name, he puts on his most feeble old-person voice and says: ‘I’ll just go and get him for you.’
“He puts the receiver down and leaves it for about five minutes, by which time they have usually thought ‘the silly old fool’s forgotten’, and hung up,” she says, emphasising that she obviously has unconventional parents because her mother also used to keep a whistle by the phone. Do not try that one.
Name of the game
Meanwhile, in the world of commerce, John Hannawin at i-Next Ltd has a company policy that states which sales calls should be taken. Unwanted callers are told that, according to policy, they must apply in writing to a named person.
“For that odd useful person you meet at a show who you do not want to get bounced in this way, pick a silly name for them to ask for – like Horatio. This works a treat, unless you have a lot of Horatios in your office.”
Jolly bad form
More about BT and calls to the US. As you will recall, John Loader at DotSix Brailling Services found it difficult to find out how much overseas calls cost.
So this week, when he received junk email from BT Broadband, he clicked on ‘unsubscribe’ – which sent him to a form to fill in.
Would he like BT Broadband? “Never in a month of Sundays,” he wrote in the comments section.
“That resulted in two phone calls and two emails,” he says. “Which is odd when the whole process was to stop the emails in the first place.”
Stay up to date
“In December we informed you of our plan to upgrade the 1&1 hosting platform,” said an email to Philip Kellingley.
“This platform upgrade is necessary for you to remain at the cutting edge of technology.
“It will be performed between 29 and 30 February 2008, from 11pm to 5am.”
That is cutting edge all right.
Reign of errors
We asked for your CV errors. “I regularly find incorrectly addressed emails with CVs attached that I have to forward to HR, although some were meant for another company,” says Su Armitage at Senator.
“Invariably the first item in their list of attributes is ‘close attention to detail’.”
When listing achievements in his CV, one individual presumably meant to say: “I constructed a database that assisted in the running of my employer’s business,” says Tony Gist at TG training.
“But the person wrote: ‘I constructed a database that assisted in the ruining of my employer’s business’.”
Whether he was telling the truth or not, it’s not a good sign. He didn’t get the job. More CV errors please.
Sound judgement
Several of you point to the caption on the front page of last week’s issue:
“Laws must be tougher to beat illegal downloads of music by artists such as Amy Winehouse”.
You would have thought she could afford to buy music legally by now.
