The chill of cold callers

Sometimes the hawkers bombard us with calls to our domestic and mobile phone numbers, mainly employing the dreaded recorded message. I prefer these, because of my expletives being uttered into a void.

Other times the unprincipled companies who half-employ poor e-hawkers as a back-up don’t even have the decency to call in person but just stick us on a robotic recorded loop intoning endlessly about that accident we never had or that payment protection we remain unaware of.

But for those calls which are not taped guff, but delivered by unfortunate humans, before you tell them where you want to tell them to go, often in terms as terse as those used in the shortest sentence in the Bible, aim for brief rather than abusive.

Because it’s not their fault, and if they are stuck in a call centre they need at least a polite rejection from you. Just say no, quickly.

That has been my watchword over the years, because before my gilded career — irony alert! — in journalism many decades ago I had a few months to fill and spent part of that mixed fruit of a time doing many things.

Some involved heavy lifting of carpets and heavy rubber underlay or wardrobes. But this was better than the low point of picking cigarette butts out of urinals with a tooth-pick.

So when some upbeat kid phones me — whether from Delhi or around the corner in Lanarkshire or Fife — about some wildly bad consumer offer, I always have a twinge of guilt as I tell him or her to get lost. It’s not their fault.

However, now and then we get to put a name to the vile company we always longed to hate. Step forward Home Energy and Lifestyle Management, a company which has bombarded us all with untold nuisance calls in recent months.

A spokesman was on tap yesterday wittering about software errors. We care not for that explanation. It is knowing greed and wilful ignorance of the law which drives companies to conduct this activity.

Constantly phoning people’s home or mobile numbers is a horrible practice and amazingly difficult to stop. More companies who practise it should be named and shamed. This firm, Helm, made six million calls in three months, mainly a bogus offer of “free” solar panels, which were, of course, far from free.

The company’s ignorance of the law was described as “beyond belief” as the firm’s solicitor made a lame attempt to blame a software glitch. That says it all. A wee bit of software can send out a message to six million consumers.

No wonder business loves the idea and may turn a blind eye to the rules. For every hundred recipients there may be ten who listen to a pitch and one who falls for it. One in a hundred is a good return when your computer is pumping out six million calls.

But it’s not really a result. It may work in the short-term in some instances, but in the long run is it a way to operate as a business or stay onside with customers?

Worse, what if it’s not a robotic message you are receiving on your phone, but a cheerful message from the Indian sub-continent or from just round the corner? Are we then meant to ignore the implications of zero hours contracts, the minimum wage or the even more unlikely prospect of the living wage?

For the companies which, like midges, are there to hamper your enjoyment of Scottish life, are the ones least likely to abide by the niceties of employment law.

We like to imagine that new jobs are good jobs, and some of our call centre jobs are better than this crude stuff, but the truth is that our best hope is that a turning economy will create better ones.

Can we be confident of that? Probably not, although some analysts are predicting a labour shortage and a wages boom over the next decade. We’ll see about that, but for now we should all be respectful of kids making their way in our High Streets and in those damned call centres. Just don’t call in the middle of Ray Donovan.