Amphigouri: varnished nonsense

… annoying, cold-calling vendors.

phone rings

me: Hello, this is Beth.

Them: Hello, may I speak with <insert name of woman who has been retired for 18-20 months and whose phone number I have apparently inherited>?

me: I’m sorry, she doesn’t work here any more, she retired.

Them: Are you the person in charge of email security?

me: . o 0 (been in the email-admin bizniz, no way in hell I’d do that again) I’m sorry, no I’m not.

Them: In that case, could you forward me to the person who is in charge of email security?

me: . o 0 (NO WAY IN HELL am I foisting you upon our email admin, even though he’d win and would be much less gracious about it than I am) I’m sorry, I don’t know who that would be. Could I take your name and number and when I find out I can have that person call you?

Them: No, how about I call you back in a couple of hours so when you find out you can tell me then?

me: . o 0 (tricksy bastahd. Why don’t you just save us both from this back-and-forth crap and go to our website — surely you have that information — and look for the email admin there? His name and contact info is public.) To what is this in regards? . o 0 (why o why am I unable to just hang up?)

Them: I’m from <insert name of company here> and I’m calling around to invite email administrators to our webinar on email security.

me: . o 0 (in other words, you’re looking to beef up your e-rolodex so you can spam contacts with content they really don’t care about, just like <insert name of other company that keeps spamming me just because I’m in their db of ppl who attended a webinar>) Yeah, well. Hurm. I don’t think there’s anyone in our department who would be interested.

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Hateses vendors who cold-call, particularly when they don’t even really appear to know who they’re calling. Hateses them, I do.

This unsolicited note in my inbox this afternoon:

Beth,

According to my research, it looks like you and your organization are in a great position to leverage web-based collaboration solutions. Business benefits you can expect include reducing travel costs and increasing revenue, profitability and productivity.

Do you have a moment to set up a brief discussion about your business needs? Please reply with a date and time.

Kind regards,

[name deleted to protect guilty]
Director, Customer Success

I’m sorry, name, but your research appears to be faulty, as I (and generally my colleagues) actually wouldn’t really be appropriate customers for your product. Unless by “research” you really meant “harvesting of emails from ppl who have ever been required to enter email/name data while attending a conference using your product and aren’t currently customers.”

When I converted my old and nearly-abandoned MT site to WP at the beginning of the year, I discovered several draft posts that were years old and had never made it to the “published” state. Here’s one from September of ‘02 describing a scene at my previous job. I have no real recollection of this event, but can pretty much guess at the players involved. Cracks me up.

I work with a bunch of engineers. Today I was in a meeting with a number of high-level managers and mucky-mucks in our company, which can sometimes be daunting (all that brain-power in one room!) if one doesn’t know them very well. I’ve been here long enough to have interacted with a number of them frequently, so I’m no longer as intimidated or “in awe” as I was when I first started working for this company. They’re really a great bunch of people, and today two of them gave prime examples of how Mucky-mucks Are People, Too:

Gotta love it when you look up near the end of the meeting and catch one of the upper-level managers making a paper airplane from the meeting handout.

We were having a discussion on our corporate email filters and how well they work (or don’t) at keeping out spam. One manager mentioned that he didn’t think there were many filters in place these days, as he’s been getting tons of porn spam in the last couple of weeks. One of the company Fellows, with a mock look of disappointment, interrupted: “Huh. I didn’t!!”