Unsolicited calls, Junk SMSes
You are concentrating on on your work, and suddenly your cell phone rings. You take the call, only to hear a pre-recorded message being played in Kannada!. Dhud. Its real painful.
I am not sure from where these folks get our mobile numbers from! Sometimes, when I get such calls, I ask them from where did they get my number. And most of the time, the response i get is, “From our database, Sir” ! Wow.. What an answer !!… Excuse me… “Who put the data in the database ?“……… “We don’t know Sir“…….
I get calls from almost all companies, mostly financial in nature. HDFC, ICICI, Citibank (the most painful - stay away from this group!), SBI, Credit card, Club membership, holiday packages etc. You name it! One should be very assertive while speaking to these people. My Standard response to these “Sorry. I am not interested. Thanks“. Hangup. Done in 10 Sec. But sometimes, its fun. One of the funny conversations that i had:
Sales Guy over Phone : “Am i talking to Mr. Shyam (some guy xyx)”
Me : “There is no one called shyam here.”
Sales guy : “May I know whom am i talking to?”
Me : “This is Arjun, Who am i talking to ?”
Sales guy : “Sir, which company do you work for?”
Me : “xyz …………………….”
Sales guy : “Sir, i am calling from SBI cards, Bangalore. Do you have a SBI Card?”
……………………………….now starts the fun…………………………….
Me : “No”
Sales guy : “Why don’t you take a SBI card, Sir ”
Me : “Hmm……….. I already have other cards “ ………. bla bla bla
Sales guy : “Its free…….” …………. more bullshit…
Me : “But I am in mangalore…………” ___Dhud! for the sales guy!.
Me : “Can you come down to Mangalore and explain me the details ?”.
Sales guy : “Sir, Are you coming to Bangalore in the near future?”
Me : “No. I wont”
Sales guy : “thank you sir”.
—hang up—————-lol———–
Poor fellow. Anyway, sometimes its fun/time-pass talking to these people :D lol
Even if its a wrong number, these people try to get some business!
The next category of nuisance is the Junk SMS, and in my case, Airtel is the king in this! We have totally two airtel mobile connections and a BSNL mobile connection in our family.
BSNL is virtually SPAM free. The BSNL folks are just too lazy to send junk SMS i guess :). Good for us! But Airtel is a pain. They constantly spam your mobile inbox with JUNK SMSes, ranging from contest to astrology to dialtones to music to pizza to jackpot to what not! Its very annoying.
I just couldn’t tolerate if further, called up their customer care, and logged a complaint recently. After that, the amount of Spam SMS is come down. But will have to wait and watch.
This one was the worst ever :
I have a Airtel Land line at home for my broadband access. Now, during one of the service calls, i had given my BSNL mobile number to them so that they could update me about the status of my service request. And guess what?., After some days, I started to get Junk SMSes from Airtel on my BSNL cell!! So, be careful! Again, in this case, I have raised a complaint. As of now, they have stopped the SMSes, but will have to wait for sometime to be really true. We never know. In future, they might again pick it up form the database and use it for their next campaign!
5 comments | May 11th, 2005 at 10:15am