I didn’t much like telephone surveys when I had a landline telephone. Now that I’ve gone totally cellular, I like them even less.
At least I’ve figured out how to get off one list. I received a call tonight from a New York area code. The number was 212-529-5461. It rang, I answered and then the call disconnected. That 1-second call, of course, cost me a full minute of my plan minutes, so I wasn’t happy. At first I passed it off to a wrong number, but then decided to do a little poking around on the Internet.
It turns out the number belongs to a company called Central Research in New York City. According to some Internet reports (mostly blogs and you can give those the weight you think they deserve), the company conducts push polls for Republican political candidates and groups.
They are very responsive to requests for removal though. I called the company less than five minutes later and requested they remove my number from the calling list. According to commenters on one message board, the company is good about removing numbers from its list. If you want to be removed from the list, call 212-260-0070. A nice man answered my call within three rings, took down my number, apologized for the call and said it wouldn’t happen again.
Last 5 posts by Susan Engle
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May 16th, 2008 at 6:55 am
I have not received any of these calls but it brought to mind a job I had a few years ago. I worked as a receptionist at a big tech company listed on the NASDAQ. I figured out that when all of a sudden we were getting a big influx of calls from area code 212 that our stock was in the tank that day. These calls were almost without exception some stock broker in New York who insisted on being put through to the CFO immediately (like that was going to happen…ha) and then he would almost always call back within two minutes complaining that he got the CFO’s voice mail, why wasn’t he there (after all, it was 11:00 in New York!!!), blah blah blah. These people could NOT have been more rude and obnoxious.
May 16th, 2008 at 8:51 am
I have a friend who lives in the South, where there has been an influx of northerners over the past 20 years. He says “Yankees” (to him, that means people from New Jersey and New York) are in too much of a hurry.
Of course, the man I talked to couldn’t have been more pleasant or polite. It probably helps that he’s not a stockbroker. Although it remains to be seen whether my request for removal worked, I’m hopeful.