While it’s true that a lot of telemarketers are just folks trying to make ends meet, you still shouldn’t feel bad about hanging up on them in mid-sentence.
Many telemarketers aren’t actually allowed to end a call without making a sale; if they did so voluntarily, they’d be fired. By corporate edict, that call was only ever going to end in one of two ways: with you buying something, or with you hanging up on them. There’s no point trying to end the conversation politely because the script they’re working off of demands that they ignore and obstruct any attempt to do so – and they will be punished for failing to follow it.
You hanging up on them is literally the only way for them to get out of a call that’s not going anywhere, so you might as well get it over with. You’re actually doing them a favour.
Yes.
This is also an instance of a more general principle: notice when people are weaponizing social norms, and react by refusing to play the game.
Easy mode for this is the people on the street with pamphlets. They’ll weaponize social norms in an attempt to make you stop and talk to them. One script I see, for instance:
ACTIVIST: Hi! Excuse me, are you a student here?
PASSER-BY: –yes, I am.
ACTIVIST: Do you care about the ethical treatment of minorities on campus?
PASSER-BY: ….um, yes, but…
ACTIVIST: Were you aware that 90% of statistics about minorities are made up on the spot to serve as examples in tumblr posts?
PASSER-BY: …no, I wasn’t, but I really have to…
ACTIVIST: Here’s what our organization does to fight that!
…and so forth.
The trick here, of course, is that the first question is one which it’s socially unacceptable to avoid answering. If the activist opens with “would you like to help save a photogenic animal today?” you can say “no thank you.” If they open with “do you care about the whales?” you can grit your teeth and say “nope.”
But how do you respond to “are you a student here”? It’s a yes or no question, to which you definitely know the answer, so you can’t mumble something about not knowing. And it’s not explicitly related to their cause, so you can’t just automatically say “not today thanks.” (If you try either of those, they’ll call you on it – “what, you’re not a student today?”)
Ignoring them, or saying “that’s none of your business” or “leave me alone,” is a violation of social norms, and means you look like a jerk, because they asked a question that’s well within the realm of what’s socially permissible. So if you’re playing by social norms, you have to answer.
And then, once you’ve answered, you’re engaged in conversation with them. It’s an egregious violation of social norms to walk away from a conversation without going through the normal conversation-ending procedures. And they of course will not participate in those. So now you’re trapped, where you would have been free under social norms to walk past someone shouting at you about statistics if you hadn’t yet engaged with them.
The only way to escape these situations is to notice them and step outside the social game. This is hard; you will get intense this-is-awkward, I-am-being-awful-and-mean feedback from your brain, which has noticed you are violating the rules and would like you to stop. But walking away without saying anything, or saying “I don’t want to talk right now,” is in fact the correct thing to do here.
And that’s easy mode. People selling something play this game blatantly. Hard mode is people who play it expertly, within society, so that you have to go along with what they want or be forced into violating social norms. (And people will go along with a lot rather than violate social norms.) Friends who ask you for things in a way that makes it awkward to refuse. Family members who treat you badly but do it in a way contrived so that any complaint will constitute you being rude. In the really extreme cases, the same dynamic shows up in abusive relationships. It’s the adult version of an abuser convincing a kid he’ll get in trouble if he tells his parents.
So this is, IMO, a really important skill to learn and to deploy properly. Social norms are great, I love doing the dance of social convention, it’s lovely and satisfying, but if your partner keeps trying to stab you with a poisoned dagger, maybe it’s time to stop dancing. Even if that looks weird in the middle of the dance floor.
This is something I never thought needed to be broken down before, but once you did it helped make a lot of things clear. Like, I already knew that sales people are pushy and try to rope you into conversations that are difficult to terminate, but describing the reasons why those conversations feel so awkward to leave abruptly was super enlightening.
Well said.
One other reason that people feel uncomfortable breaking social norms is the fear of retaliation. This is one that the face-to-face marketers tend to play on more than the telemarketers.
There’s a reason that chuggers (“charity muggers”) frequently pick on women – female-socialised people find it harder to say “no” and walk away from a social interaction. Some of this may be due to fear of retaliation. Lots of situations in which “a stranger forces you into weird public engagement” can escalate horribly, so it’s often easier to just mumble along with them and contrive an escape. Rejection (of the chugger/catcaller/marketer) is something that sometimes leads to retaliation, so depending on your experiences you might find yourself being afraid to “just walk away.”
I have had two experiences where chuggers caught me in public and reacted badly to my flat rejections. They were both men chugging for Greenpeace, and I actually complained to the organisation about them. Because they’re playing on social norms as well, using aspects of themselves in the marketing performance, they can get waaay too invested and in-character, and treat it as a social/sexual rejection, apparently. One of them actually lost his head and chased me down the street, shouting.
Anyway the best way I found to stop both of them was to stand at bay and scream “STOP HARASSING ME”, which created such public amazement among the other people on the sidewalk that the chuggers had to put their hands up and back away.
With the chasing-guy he sort of did a defeated primal scream and went back to his pitch, presumably having come back to his senses. but the other guy just raised his eyebrows like “hey WOW fair enough” so it worked out okay.
Basically even if there is retaliation, just remember that THEY STARTED IT and THEY MADE IT WEIRD.
I ran into two guys “talking” to people in a store and then in the food court who were recruiting for their church (which is shady af). The first guy they spoke to counld have been a discussion between people who knew each other but the second was a young black man you looked decidedly uncomfortable. I have never been one to ascribe to societal norms so I accosted them and asked them what they were soliciting. They panicked a bit and said all three of them went to the same church (which was not what the body language of the young black man said). To which I then replied, “Oh. So you’re soliciting religion. Creepy. Listen, this place as a very firm no solicitation policy and I’m going to report you as violating that policy for soliciting religion.” They panicked and left in a hurry. Once they left the building, I asked the young black man if he was okay and he said he was. I left him alone to finish his lunch (which was clearly what he wanted, since he put his headphones back in and started smiling at his video). I have never seen those two return to the store or food court where I found them. My point – many in-person telemarketers (or whatever) aren’t allowed in public spaces or businesses, including college campuses. They can hang out and have a booth or sit peacefully and talk to people who approach them but they are usually not supposd to force contact.
C.A. Jacobs
C.A. Jacobs 