There is nothing more pleasing than being at home of an evening watching a movie or having dinner with the family or soaking in a well-earned bubble bath or alphabetising your pet rock collection and being interrupted at 7.15pm by a phone call from some guy in India who wants to offer you a 40 per cent discount on a set of gold-plated metal posts suitable for fences and for gates and for inserting up the wazoo of some guy in India. Or possibly not.
Make no mistake: the telemarketing industry is a highly organised, highly regulated, highly respected entity - with "highly respected" being used here in its strictest possible sense so as not to be confused with terms such as "deeply despised", "universally resented" or "immeasurably annoying".
Still, when telemarketers are at parties they don't tell anyone they're telemarketers. They tell them they're ... signwriters, astronauts, hookers, professional sandblasters - anything - just to get people off the subject. This isn't because they are liars, but because they don't want to find themselves with a swizzle-stick up each nostril and a bowl of eggplant dip on their head.
Jim Schembri writing in The Age on Friday has done his best to give telemarketers as almighty wallop. Whilst the message might hurt a bit, the piece is funny as all hell. It's true that telemarketers do have a pretty low public standing, and it makes life tough for those who do it day in and day out. Everyone seems to have a telemarketing horror story, and it doesn't seem to be a perception that will change easily. Maybe it's time for a more public defence of telemarketing rather than simply allowing the sales staff on the front-line to cop all the abuse.
(Note to self: do not attend party with Jim Schembri and eggplant dip.)
