79 cents worth of privacy

Just the other day I bought some granola bars because I’m laboring under what might be an illusion that they’re healthier than candy bars, but even if they’re not healthier at least I feel better about myself because I didn’t load up on what I really wanted: Snickers, Butterfingers and the Devil’s Official Snack, Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups.

It’s good to feel better about yourself because mental health is important; especially if it’s the only kind of health you’re likely to experience.

But when I got to the checkout counter the grocery store clerk asked me for my phone number.

“Why do you need my phone number to sell me granola bars?”

He explained that the granola bars were on sale, but to get that discount I had to give his company my phone number and when I said I was going to skip the discount he handed me my receipt and basically said if I came to my senses and returned to the store and gave them my phone number, they’d give me 79 cents.

Which I believe technically qualifies as extortion, mainly because I’m too lazy to look up the actual definition of extortion.

Anyway…

I already feel like far too many people have my cell phone number and that includes some members of my immediate family so I’m not thrilled with handing it out to random strangers in grocery stores.

Here’s why.

The Curse of Robocalls

Back when I first started getting cell phone calls from unfamiliar numbers in New Jersey or Florida or the suburbs of Mumbai, India, my son (who is way smarter than me) told me companies were collecting my information so they could sell it to other companies so those other companies could call me up and offer to help me pay off my non-existent college loan or help me apply for Medicare or “consolidate my debt” which sounds a lot better than “taking out yet another loan when you’ve already borrowed too much money.”

So now whenever I get a call from an unfamiliar number I don’t answer, but listen to the voicemail just to make sure it wasn’t an actual human with a real reason for calling me and if it wasn’t – and it pretty much never is – I block the number, which doesn’t slow these Cell Phone Pests down for one second because they’ll just call you again from a different number and I once counted the same robocall voicemail coming from 13 different phone numbers.

So next I went back to my son (have I mentioned he’s way smarter than me?) and asked how could this method of sales possibly be effective because everybody I know hates these robocalls and might even vow to never, ever, never buy anything from the company that’s harassing them and my son said it doesn’t have to result in actual sales to make it worth doing.

How, might you ask?

(And you better ask or this rant is already over.)

The Curse of Bureaucracies

Let’s say you’re a VP in charge of sales and you’re asked to do something about the fact that nobody wants to buy your shitty product so you hire a company to make robocalls on your behalf and then you can go to the next sales meeting and say, “We contacted 10,000 new customers this week” while ignoring the fact that 9,999 of those customers are pretty pissed off about it.

When I still worked for a newspaper we would occasionally hire a consultant who didn’t live in our town and hadn’t ever worked for a newspaper to tell us what we were doing wrong.

As far as I know, we never followed any of the consultant suggestions because it seems like the real point was hiring a consultant so if somebody got asked what they were doing about a problem they could say they had hired a consultant to look into it.

Also…

I once sat through a day-long meeting in which we were asked to come up with our goals for the coming year and we made a long list and when we were asked to do it again the next year I said:

“Why don’t we turn in the list from last year because we didn’t do any of that shit.”

Turns out, companies like to say they want “outside-the-box thinking,” but in reality aren’t all that happy when you actually provide some and if they really wanted “outside-the-box thinking” they wouldn’t ask you to sit in a cubicle while you do it.

When you’re young and naïve and still think Santa Claus brings you presents, you might think having meetings is the way people communicate and problems get solved, but after a few decades of sitting in meetings that don’t produce jackshit you realize that in many cases the real point is having a meeting. Bureaucrats love meetings because then they have something to say whenever anyone asks what they’re doing about some problem:

“We recently formed a task force to look into that.”

Closing the barn door after the horse bought some sunglasses

If you want more proof that a lot of this sales harassment is ineffective, a while back I bought a pair of sunglasses over the internet and clearly somebody is keeping track of my purchases because for the next few weeks I couldn’t go back on the internet without being bombarded with ads for sunglasses.

Which if you think about it (and clearly someone didn’t) is really stupid because the last thing I need is a new pair of sunglasses (and let’s put this in italics so maybe someone will remember) because I just bought a pair of sunglasses.

But that’s probably irrelevant because somebody somewhere is taking credit for connecting sunglass manufacturers with people who are clearly interested in their product.

So if you buy my theory, (OK, actually it’s my son’s theory and remember, he’s way smarter than me) bottom line: your phone is blowing up with unwanted sales calls because someone, somewhere is covering their ass.

Everybody has their price and mine’s five bucks

So now I’m back at the same grocery store dealing with the same clerk and this time I’m buying a bag of French Roast coffee and he says:

“Phone number? It will save you five bucks.”

And I say:

“Hey, I already told you I don’t want to give out my…wait…how much?”

He says five bucks again so I didn’t mishear him and then he says:

“Just give me any number…it doesn’t have to be yours.”

But I didn’t want to give out some made-up number because it might turn out to be somebody’s real number and then some poor slob who never did anything wrong will start getting robocalls meant for me.

And then I got another robocall.

So I saved that phone number and the very next time I got asked to give one out I gave out the robocaller’s number which seems fair because now the robocallers can start calling each other and leave me out of it and I’m going to urge you to do the same and maybe we can start a national movement and even if it doesn’t work we can all enjoy a cup of coffee that cost us five buck less than normal.

And you know what goes great with a cup of coffee?

A granola bar…and I know where you can get some cheap.