A winning strategy

Tonight there were 3 (UPDATE - 4 calls - see below) calls to the house from telemarketers that once you picked up, played an automatic message that put you on hold to wait for a live person. I hung up each time. (and its only 6:30pm, so I expect a few more calls! Light those lights!!)

Seriously, is this a winning strategy? Does telemarketing even work anymore? And as long as I'm asking, does fax spam work? I'd say we have at least one, if not two fax spams per day at the office. All of these various spams actually have a real world cost component as compared to email spam, so the folks involved really need to use winning strategies and techniques in order to get their ROI.

Calling someone only to put them on hold seriously can't increase their chances of actually selling you something.

It must work, 'cause they're still at it.

UPDATE - got a 4th call, so I stayed on the line and after 35 seconds, got a person. I asked him several times for the name of the company he was calling for, "Allied..." something or other, he was deliberately slurring the name since he was alert that I was PO'd. Upon the "remove my number from your database" request, he danced around the issue and then flat out told me that "since you are being uncooperative, I'm going to leave you on the list since I don't believe that you are responsible for the billing on this number." A-M-A-Z-I-N-G