Christmas on Hold

When a telemarketer calls during dinner, a primitive instinct makes you want to yell at them. But for Christians, suggests Kim Peckham, there’s a better option.

Sometimes I wish the Bible were more specific. For example, I looked for counsel to share with my wife regarding how much money she can spend on a visit to the hair salon. The Bible writers are strangely silent on this subject. Is $50 too much? $100? Or is any amount all right as long as you make a matching contribution to Perms for the Poor?

If the prophets had been a little more specific, perhaps we would know how to deal with modern questions such as, “Is it OK to clone a human?”

My answer is no. Too many of us would have our feelings hurt. Imagine one of your grown children saying, “Mum, we were thinking about cloning you for our next daughter, but we’ve decided to go with Sammy, the weathergirl, instead.”

There’s another contemporary issue that I wish had received the attention of the apostles, and that is the matter of what to do with telemarketers.

I get a lot of calls from these folk. I often pick up the phone to find a man with an inordinate interest in my home security. Or it might be a woman offering me a credit card with exciting new benefits, including the ability to lower my cholesterol with every purchase.

I would like to stop these phone calls, but I don’t know how. A quick exchange of emails with my representative in the government informs me that there are legal issues that prevent the deportation of telemarketers.
Of course, I could simply stop answering the phone, but there’s always the chance that the caller will be a family member willing to talk about my health ailments.

So what exactly should a Christian do when the person on the other end of the line cheerfully mispronounces your name (they’re possibly calling from India) and begins to extol the manifold wonders of their long-distance service?

The immediate temptation is to shout abuse and slam down the phone. But I always have the nagging feeling that there’s a little mark by my name on the telemarketing call-sheet that says “professed Christian.” What if the person calling mutters, “Hmmm. I can see that all that talk about brotherly love isn’t cramping your style.”

It helps to remember that telemarketers are not necessarily bad people. Just because they interrupt your dinner does not make them evil on the same scale as a bioterrorist, used-car saleman or a programming executive at MTV. Telemarketers are just doing their job—which, unfortunately, happens to be annoying. They’re no worse than street mimers in that sense.

I have a kindly brother-in-law who believes that all telemarketers are unhappy in their job. So he views every sales call as a cry for help. Trying to be sympathetic, he will say, “Let’s not talk business. I’d like to get to know you as a person.” His conversations are generally very brief.

You can also keep your time on the telephone to a minimum if you say, “I’ll listen to your sales pitch if you’ll listen to me describe the accomplishments of my granddaughter. She’s in ballet, you know.”

When Jesus was talking about turning the other cheek, He wasn’t limiting His remarks to hand-to-hand combat. He meant for us to overlook petty annoyances (such as the telemarketer who won’t take “I’m not interested” for an answer) that tempt us to unleash some annoying behaviour of our own. It’s times like this when we need to put someone on hold, and that someone is ourselves.

Since you’re probably still wondering how to deal with telemarketers, here’s what I suggest you do:
1. Be polite.
2. Ask to be put on their do-not-call list.
3. Wait for them to finish their “courtesy close.” (Muting the TV is optional.)

Reprinted, with permission, from Women of Spirit.

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