Call It Off

My daughter is learning the finer points of answering the telephone.

At nine, she has mastered the mad dash on the first ring, so she answers it more often than her jaded parents. After all, it’s already for her most of the time, anyway.

She’s also great at taking messages when we’re not home (although I expect this to decline steeply as she approaches her teenage years). She even handles the subtleties of taking a message when someone is indeed home, but indisposed — although she has, on occasion, delivered a cordless phone into the bathroom.

Now I’m teaching her about The Pause. You know: That moment of dead air between the time you say “Hello?” and the time the telemarketer who’s using an auto-dialer picks up the line and mispronounces your name. I know it’s trouble when Jaime rushes from the dinner table on the first ring.

“Hello?” she chirps. Long pause.

“Helloo?” she says again. Then a confused silence, then a short trot to hand me the phone. Hmmm. Long-distance service? Magazine subscriptions? Membership renewal for National Public Radio?

Whatever it is, it doesn’t go with the roast beef and mashed potatoes growing cold on my daughter’s plate.

We have recently instituted an Answering Machine Rule for meal times (except during breakfast, when it might be a carpooling emergency). Now we’re tackling the best way to handle The Pause.

My strategy is this: If no one responds to your first “hello” in three seconds, hang up. If it was important — say, a friend who happened to be swallowing something when you answered — they’ll call back. If it was a sales call, they won’t — not tonight, at least.

Once, my own brother hung up on me when I didn’t respond to his “Hello?” fast enough. I called back right away, and starting talking on the second ring, so I was mid-sentence by the time he picked up. I didn’t mind being taken for a telemarketer once, but twice? My dignity couldn’t take it.

Is it rude to just hang up? I don’t really care. Is it ineffective? Maybe — we might get further with a request to be put on a do-not-call list. But that’s tough to teach a nine-year-old. Heck, I was in my thirties before I developed enough manners to say, “Thanks, we’re not interested” before hanging up. I now average an actual verbal response about 60 percent of the time.

Dissed Connections

We had a friend who once answered a sales call while we were at his house for a dinner party. He set the receiver down on the other side of the dining room — close enough for the caller to hear us eating and talking (and laughing at her), far enough away that no one could hear her recite the pitch (or curse us out). It sat there through the whole meal. Another friend used to put the receiver in an oven mitt — oh wait, I think that was her remedy for a chronic crank caller. Well, same difference.

It irks me, the trouble we all take in order to avoid sales calls. My sister has Caller ID, but anyone calling from outside her immediate neighborhood (like, oh, me) appears as “OUT OF AREA,” which she automatically translates to “sales call.” A friend’s answering machine has this well-mannered greeting: “If this is a sales solicitation, thank you for taking our name off your list. Friends, family, and associates are welcome to leave a message.” As if a sales rep ever would.

Telemarketers spent almost $28 billion on consumer calls this year, and they’ll spend nearly $34 billion by 2005, according to Direct Marketing Association projections. I get a shiver thinking about all that dead airtime on my answering machine.

The thing that blows my mind is that telemarketers sold $166 billion worth of stuff this year ($220 billion by 2005, by the way). I wonder how much gets bought during dinner.

Twenty states have laws requiring telemarketers to keep do-not-call lists, and another 20 are considering them. “Just think how tempting it is for a politician to turn to his or her constituents and say, ‘Behold! I give you peace at dinner time!’” DMA president H. Robert Wientzen told attendees at the association’s conference in October.

Wientzen also warned that some legislators are mulling over a national do-not-call list. Maybe by the time she’s my age, my daughter won’t have to learn to be nice about unsolicited sales calls.

Maybe she’ll get her Christmas thank-you notes written by then, too.