Shane Hegarty's encyclopaedia of modern Ireland
They call at the worst times. At 8am on a Saturday, for instance. Or during your father's wake. "Hello, we would like to ask you some survey questions. It won't take longer than five minutes." Banks seem particularly keen to canvass your opinion on their services, and spend far more time doing that than, say, investigating novel ways of saving you money. They act like institutions with self-esteem issues, constantly looking for someone to tell them, on a scale of one to five (with one being "not satisfied" and five being "very satisfied") just how satisfied you are with them.
New telephone companies, not surprisingly, use cold calls to alert potential customers to how they can save €40 a year on calls to countries that start with the letter E. It's just such a shame that they insist on waiting until you've turned on the shower before calling. A ringing phone is impossible to ignore; this call could be vital. So you scramble to the phone - towel sucking at your ankles, feet sliding on the laminate floor, only to discover that it's only Tele2 calling you for the third time this week. And as you stand there, dripping wet, two thoughts go through your head: how quickly can you tell them to go away? And how many people are electrocuted each year answering the phone while wet?
The coldest of all cold callers, however, are those people who want to give you a free Caribbean cruise. But first they need to ask you a few dozen straightforward questions, such as your credit card details, the security code for your alarm, what dates you'll be leaving the house and under which flowerpot you leave the spare key. And like those free newspaper scratch cards that you always win on, you can't help but be mesmerised by their generosity, until you finally realise that, as you've been dreaming of cocktails in Aruba, a man in an office in Holland has been ravaging your account.
Sometimes companies ring and inexplicably hang up just as you answer, leaving you with a singular emptiness that comes from being snubbed by a computer. No number shows up on the digital read-out. They have your number, but you cannot get theirs. Otherwise, the public would spend all day calling them and either hanging up or asking if they have two minutes to answer a few questions. Question one: why do you keep calling me?
When even the chronically lonely are screaming that they want to be left alone, then things must have reached a crisis point. Companies might start doing cold call surveys on the effectiveness of cold call surveys. "On a scale of one to five, with one being 'very annoyed' and five being 'psychotically enraged', how irritated are you by repeated cold calls?" I'm not sure. Does the scale go to six?