I am a receptionist at a software company, so I get all the telemarketing people. Usually, I transfer them over to my supervisor because she is good at saying no and hanging up, where as I'm too polite.
I got a call from Tel America when Kathy was out on site so I tried my best to reason with them and tell them no. Then they told me that we had purchased with them before and at this point in time, I had only been with the company for a few months, so I didn't know the truth. I told them to call back the next day and my supervisor, Kathy, would be able to talk to them.
The woman continued, saying if I made the purchase, we would recieve an invoice and if Kathy decided we didn't need their services (a listing in their directory) we could throw out the invoice and all would be done. So I said fine if it would get me off the phone, it didn't sound too bad.
They transferred me to the recording part where I answered a series of questions. When the woman got to "Are you authorized to make such a purchase?" I told her that I was not and that she would have to talk to my supervisor about this. The woman grew aggrevated and sent me back to the other part of the office again.
The woman I had first talked to continued to tell me that all I had to do was say that I was authorized to make the purchase on the recording, and just like she said before, when we got the invoice, if my superivsor didn't want it we could simply not pay. I was getting very impatient so I agreed to do this and they recorded me saying I was authorized to make this purchase.
In the next few weeks, I got the invoice in the mail and like they told me I could do, I threw it in the garbage. A few weeks after that, they sent another invoice, which I showed to Kathy and was told to throw it out after telling her the story. Then they called the office.
She talked with them behind closed doors for about an hour and in the end, told me to send the invoice down to Florida (our headquarters) to be paid. I felt terribly, the cost of the invoice is $369!! I cost my company $369!!! On the front of the last invoice we've recieved, it says "We have confirmed that your company placed the order fully undertsanding our company's procedures. Please feel free to contact us so that we can substantiate this with a recorded verification (in bold) of the transaction".
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