In public speaking, the most important focus for orators must be establishing an identity, indeed an engagement, with their audiences. Regardless of the topic, once that level of rapport has been achieved, the speaker has the listeners on his side.
Last month, I thought of that bond between a speaker and an audience when I attended a program during which the featured speaker commenced by saying that he had received five spam calls that morning, noting how annoying he found them. As I looked around the room, I beheld a bevy of heads nodding in agreement, as if we all were bobbleheads atop a car’s dashboard.
I did not have the opportunity to speak with the gentleman, but if I had, I might have told him how I handle such a nuisance. The most common caller is someone asking if I have Medicare, Parts A & B. Sometimes I respond by saying that at 52 (not my real age), I am too young for Medicare and urge the interloper to call back in 13 years. Usually, the caller is flabbergasted that the figures could be that skewed and thanks me for alerting the company to its erroneous database.
A few days thereafter, in a similar call from that cohort, I answered by saying that I had switched to Plans Q & R, which had lower deductibles, and I recommended that she consider doing likewise. She replied, “Thank you for your time.”
A method of answering a “potential spam” call that I have hoped would be foolproof with respect to the Medicare question, is to speak gobbledygook, as if one were chatting with a newborn and not to a professor of English literature at Harvard, which I am not.
Retaining my proficiency in the field of gobbledygook from my early days of parenthood many years ago, I was hoping that by demonstrating it to her, my non-words would cause her to delete my name from her roster of suckers. Although the solicitor was left speechless and closed in frustration without even saying goodbye, within a few days, or even hours, I found that a colleague would call again.
As analogous reply is to affect a very cultured foreign accent while saying “I do not speak English.” Immediately, the caller will switch to Spanish, to which I reply once again, “I do not speak English,” followed by the telephone call terminating with the sound of the off button, leaving the caller at loose ends.
This week, I received a call from a man asking, “Who am I speaking with?” I told him that many people, particularly schoolteachers, could be offended and put off by hearing a sentence ending in a preposition, and that grammatically he should ask, “With whom am I speaking?”
He attempted to justify himself by saying that he was trying to make the chat more conversational. My effort to assist him with improving his diction ended with his saying, “Thank you and goodbye.” I was pleased that I had been able to put him on the road to better grammar, however I was unable to glean the depth of his appreciation, other than to note that he did say “thank you” before clicking away.
Had we spoken more extensively, I was going to tell him about the retort of Sir Winston Churchill, who, when criticized for ending a sentence with a preposition, is reputed to have said “This is the sort of nonsense up with which I shall not put,” which might not be a completely accurate rendition of the Great Man’s words, but it could have added to the dialog, showing that not everyone agreed on that particular syntactical point, but instead he went off to harass some other person.
I presume that all these callers in making their solicitations are inspired by the immortal words of the late Phineas Taylor Barnum, that there is one born every second, and with each call they hope they have found that one. P.T. had it right. Do not be scammed and do not be spammed.
