"Courtesy" (AKA "sales")

The telephone rings. You pick it up and answer

Caller: Hello, can I speak to Mr [insert name of householder from telemarketers' list]?

 Householder (wearily): Yes.

Caller: I'm Gavin from Acompanyyouhaveneverheardof Ltd. This is just a courtesy call....

 'This is just a courtesy call' - six cheery little words that pop up from time to time, like a cold sore. In any reasonable list of phrases that could really spoil your day, 'this is just a courtesy call' will never challenge classics like 'I'm afraid we'll have to amuptate', but it's still a collection of words you'd rather not hear.

There are several options at this point. You can be polite, given that the human being on the other end is stuck a dead-end, high-stress job in a call centre and probably doesn't really want to make the call any more than you want to take it. Sadly, if you're polite and don't terminate the call at the earliest opportunity, the caller will persist (it's survival of the persistent in telesales) and will proceed to waste your time reciting the sales script.

You can be rude or sarcastic, but it's probably not fair on the person calling and it's not very satisfying anyway. Sadly, you're not speaking to the telesales managers and executives who created a business model entirely based on interrupting and annoying you in the middle of minding your own business at home - if you were, I'd recommend rudeness and sarcasm with relish.

You could pretend not to be the householder, or quietly put the handset down and walk away for five minutes until the caller eventually realises that they've been performing their sales script to nobody at all. You could make the caller repeat everything on the pretence that it's a bad line or that you're a bit simple, etc, etc, but these sort of alternatives are just variations on taunting the lowly sales drone who is no doubt already being punished enough by having to work in telesales just to make ends meet.

The best approach is to interrupt politely, but firmly, and let the caller know that you have registered with the Telephone Preference Service (TPS) because you don't want to be cold called. Beware of imitations, by the way. The Telephone Preference Service is free, but if you Google "Telephone Preference Service" at the moment, you may be directed to another service that calls itself the "Call Prevention Registry" (CPR) that claims to provide a better call-blocking service, but charges a fee. Although it doesn't cut out all cold calls, the TPS has reduced mine significantly and I have no reason to recommend the CPR

There's evidence that even the sort of people who advise telesales and call centre employers have realised that nobody believes the 'this is just a courtesy call' line any more. This isn't necessarily a welcome development. Although I'll be glad to see the back of this discredited phrase, it's only a matter of time before the marketers find another infuriating form of weasel words to keep potential suckers on the phone.

That's what I call a Big Society Bank...

Cambridge protesters took over a city bank and turned it into a library.

As part of the nationwide UK Uncut campaign against the Government’s cuts, a group of protesters occupied both the Royal Bank of Scotland and Natwest banks in the city centre on Saturday - turning Natwest into a makeshift library.

University and school students, alongside children and parents, sat on the floor of the bank and read stories to each other.

The read-in was a comment on the threat to the county’s libraries - 13 of which are under review.

From Cambridge First

Astounding science fiction

A structure and a fallible human purpose start to become evident by the next chapters of 'The Earth' and 'The Suicide of the Astronaut', in which he says, "You can leave everything, except the earth ... Land has been the context of the conflict ... Whither then are you going?" The astronaut, modern technological man, goes out into the solar system looking for meaning, but ... " ... man returned to the earth, dizzy, nauseous, and fearing doom." The astronaut then committed suicide "after he gave up on being able to find work on the ground that could sustain him."

From David Seals' appreciative review of Escacpe to Hell by Colonel Muammar Gaddafi.

I didn’t previously know that Colonel Gaddafi wrote really bad science fiction. Somehow, this doesn’t surprise me: the personality cult, the secrecy, the incoherent ideology, the constant demands for unquestioning loyalty, the reflexive attacks on outsiders and apostates – basically, he’s L. Ron Hubbard with heavy weapons and a lot more oil. Let’s just hope that, unlike L. Ron, the evil that he does dies with him.

The great reversal

The State of Working America, an ongoing analysis published since 1988 by the Economic Policy Institute, includes a wide variety of data on family incomes, wages, jobs, unemployment, wealth, and poverty that allow for a clear, unbiased understanding of the economy’s effect on the living standards of working Americans.

On the Economic Policy Institute's web site, The State of Working America

The site has an interactive income graph, which currently goes from 1917 up to 2008. Some of the comparisons are interesting:

In the decade1968-1978, average US incomes went up by $756.* The incomes of the richest 10% declined. All the growth went to the bottom 90% of earners.

In the decade 1978-1988, average incomes went up by $4,033. All growth went to the richest 10%. Incomes for the bottom 90% declined

In the 20 years from 1988 to 2008, average incomes went up by $6,853. All growth went to the top 10%. Incomes for the bottom 90% declined.

See for yourself, with many more examples and graphics, here. I wonder how the figures for the UK compare? I don't yet know, but I'd guess that some time around the start of the eighties marked a decisive swing towards increasing income inequality over here, too.

*all figures are in 2008 dollars.

via

The shooting party

Lord Mandelson attended shoot with Gaddafi's son

Lord Mandelson, the First Secretary, was last night at the centre of fresh controversy after it emerged he had recently socialised at a shoot with the son of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi.

Saif Al-Islam Gaddafi attended the event at a stately home in Buckinghamshire, along with the financier Nat Rothschild, who is a friend of Lord Mandelson. 

The Telegraph,  November 2009

"Muammar Gaddafi, our leader, is leading the battle in Tripoli, and we are with him," Saif al-Islam said.

"The armed forces are with him. Tens of thousands are heading here to be with him. We will fight until the last man, the last woman, the last bullet."

The Guardian, 21 February 2011

An intensely relaxed shooting party with Saif Al-Islam Gaddafi makes schmoozing on the yachts of billionaire oligarchs look almost respectable by comparison.

HR departments and bankers: the axis of evil

Workers are meant to be free to reveal criminal offences and failure by their firms to comply with legal obligations. The law sounds impressive, but it insists that an employee must go to his or her employer before they go public.

"It is like telling a mouse to go to the cat," David Buckle, one of London's leading employment lawyers, told me. If the employer thinks the employee may talk to the press or the authorities, he will suspend him or her and deny them access to the computer system. In Britain, the HR department of every major public or private bureaucracy knows what to do next. It tells the lawyers to seek a gagging injunction from the courts, which the judiciary will grant without demur.

Nick Cohen, writing in The Observer, on how the banks gagged any insiders who tried to point out that they were driving the economy off a cliff. If the whistle blowers had been heard and listened to, maybe we wouldn't have sleepwalked, unprepared, into the crash of '08. Lessons should have been learned, but they haven't. Now they've realised that they got away scot free, unapologetic bankers are crawling out of the woodwork, whining about the unfairness of people who dare to criticise or scrutinize them:

Frankly, the biggest issue is how do we put some of the blame game behind us? There was a period of remorse and apology for banks – that period needs to be over. 

Bob Diamond of Barclays trying to put our elected representatives in their place.

I beg to differ. Frankly, the biggest issue is how do we stop them doing it again? Rigorous oversight and protection of whistle blowers would be a good place to start. As Nick Cohen writes:

The banks are as great a threat to our national security as a foreign enemy. We collect intelligence on hostile powers. Why should we not collect it on the hostile City?

 Read the whole thing here - it's worth five minutes of anybody's time.

*Catbert is the evil director of human resources in Scott Adams' Dilbert comic strip.

Satire boom

If your regular dose of The Daily Mash still leaves you hungry for even more topical satire, may I recommend News Thump? Worth a look for the headlines alone, I'd say. Here are some recent classics:

We’ll only sell you more tear gas if you promise not to use it, Foreign Office tells Bahrain

Vote for thing that will give us more coalitions you didn’t vote for, pleads Clegg

Berlusconi insists teenage girls had sex with him for free

Osborne warns solar flare could impact excuses for next quarter’s GDP figures

Nick Clegg slams Universities for charging as much as he said they could


We’re going to help people find jobs that aren’t there, reveals Work and Pensions Pixie

Phones no-one uses to run operating system no-one likes