Cold-calling

Yet another intrusive, uninvited phone call a few minutes ago. They run at about eight a day now. People called Gareth or Samatha calling from a hi-tech shed in the early hours, Bombay time, trying to sell us something we don't need or want.

This call wasn’t. It was from the market research company Populus. A refined English voice. And to my usual polite interjection – “may I stop you there – Telephone Preference Scheme” came the lofty response that really got my blood up “Ah, it doesn’t apply to us.”

Am I supposed to be flattered by having been ‘chosen’ to receive this phone call, irrespective of what I might have been doing at the time? What I was doing at the time, actually, was one of the seven creative, high-concentration, non-remunerated jobs that fill my waking hours (no, eight – I forgot blogging.) I am now so furious at having had my concentration interrupted that I won’t be able to finish that job tonight, which is why the unctuously persistent geezer who made the call got a strident earful.

Now Populus is a highly respected market-research organisation, with innumerable clients with fat wallets who hold market-research organisations like Populus in high esteem. Me, I’ve got farmer friends who would willingly grind up market research companies small and spread them on the fields where at last they might do some good.

Market research companies cull opinions, feed them into a computer, run a stats program on them, then get paid a fortune by a client who’s been found a niche for a Kate-flavoure breakfast cereal for cats called Kitticrunch (or something. They’re still working the clock round to refine the name.)

Populus, that most honourable and worthy company, is going to be a tag on this blog. Google will pick it up tomorrow.  I’ll settle for a grudging apology and a promise not to phone me ever again, though I’d rather cold-calling was made a capital offence as the social poison of the computer age.

In the meantime, would all you faceless people I don’t know, and don’t want to know, please stop invading the privacies of my home and my mind? And stop stealing my time? My time is precious to me, even if it’s just an exploitable commodity to you.