AMEX and AFLAC Leave Me Alone!

Late Friday afternoon I came back from some errands and ran into a buzzsaw of activity at work punctuated by - sigh - a call from AMEX Merchant Services. These guys call me every 3-4 weeks to "chat me up" and see if they can suck up my time trying to tell me how to use their services more (or something). It drives me fucking crazy because they don't leave a message and AMEX is very important to us and with fraud prevention I feel that I HAVE to call them back. Time after time it’s the same, “Hi Mr. Bahr, we just want to make sure that you are satisfied with our services and see if there is anything we can do to help your business grow?”

Now, usually I say something like, "increase my line of credit back up to where it was before the Great Recession of 2008," but that just leads to a greater time-suck that I know will not yield any results. (Kind of like going into your bank and they keep trying to refinance your mortgage - not hearing you when you say you are UNDER WATER). So, this time I just said, “you can help my business by not calling me each month to waste my fucking time by trying to see how else you can insidiously worm your way into my life and business. Just STOP CALLING ME!”

I won’t go into details but it was another few minutes before I just hung up. They are relentless.

Then there are those idiots at AFLAC (yes, the stupid duck people). What is AFLAC’s deal? They come into your company and offer (sell) your employees additional benefits (insurance). The pitch to the business owner is that we can claim we offer all these fabulous benefits but don’t have to pay for them nor deal with them. Of course not, the employees pay. It’s a very very clever way of simply reaching individuals and selling them insurance, under the auspices of our business.

And, about a year ago, we tried it. We gave our employees the hour off to gather in OUR conference room while the AFLAC rep pitched their products (no doubt earning our employees’ eternal gratitude). Bottom line? Could not get enough of our employees to sign up. End of story.

Except for this. AFLAC does not have their own sales force – they use outside independent reps, basically tons of fortune-seeking down-on-their-luck insurance salespeople. And they all get the same leads. (and this partially reflects the Curse of The Inc 5,000, where getting named to the list simply brings a boatload of useless sales pitches, hucksters, and boiler-room penny-stock pickers to your phone line.)

So, every 2-3 weeks someone NEW “from AFLAC” calls me.

“We already tried you and it didn’t work.”

“Well we have some NEW products! When would be best to come in, next Tuesday at 10 or at 11:30?”

“How about never? Does never work for you? Click.”

… and another thing!