To every salesman who cold calls and cold e-mails me I have a message: I know your situation, but there’s nothing I can do for you.  No, I can’t answer your call to talk for a minute, because it easily turns into five after I sit through your pitch.  No, I do not owe you a ‘courtesy callback’ just because you were one of the many who have left me a voicemail.  As well, I have no interest in any of the following: resold telco services, rebuilt toner cartridges, or ‘scrap’ dealers looking for six month old computer gear.  My place of work has needed contracting services in the past which were typically attached to some piece of software, I myself haven’t needed the services of a generic technical consultant for nearly a decade, so those too are a waste of time.   On that note, I particularly don’t care for cold calls from consulting firms that aren’t even in my state.

I have a soft spot for many of these companies as I used to work for consulting companies.  Even now my job depends on the ability of our sales staff to cajole customers into either buying our products or buying more of them.  One vendor in particular, from whom I have bought no products from ever, has been cold calling me once every week or two for ten years.  About five years ago I tried to tell them to give it up but they’ve persisted.  Needless to say I’ve been through generations of sales people; every six months it’s a different voice that’s desperate to get a sale, any sale, from my disembodied voicemail call tag.

Unfortunately you cold-callers, since we migrated to a new voicemail system many years ago I now use it to expedite your voicemails right into the digital void, never to be heard, ever.  I wish I had it in me to manage a half dozen vendor relationships, but we do not have that much business and what we do have I need to use as a carrot for our occasional goofy request from our vendor with whom we have a long term trusted relationship.