Today I received a phone call on my personal cell phone, from a voice that I didn’t recognize. He said “is this"(my name). Yes, I replied, what can I do for you? Then he went in to a sales pitch. He was not selling a consumer product or service. Sometimes at work, I make purchases for my employer, at times in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. These are not products or services that anyone would use at home. He was calling about such a service, that I could only buy at work, although I had never done business with this individual nor his company in the past.
I said “How did you get this number?”. He said “well you know What’s App or Facebook, it’s on the internet”. I don’t have any traditional social media accounts and have never published my number online. I am sure that he must have found it somewhere on the internet. I said “This is my personal cell phone number. I share it with my colleagues from work, but not with any sales people from work. You’ll need to call me back on my office number at work". Then he asked a few questions that I could tell were supposed to get me talking about my employer’s potential use of his company’s services. I said “really, I don’t talk to sales people from work on my personal phone, you’ll need to call my office number”. He said “but I don’t have your office number?”. I said “if you call the company’s main number and ask for me by name, they’ll put you through. I have to go. Goodbye”.
That guy burned the bridge before he even opened his mouth. I figured that I’ll let him try to reach me on my phone at work, even though I don’t spend much time in my office there. If he ever gets through to me there, I have a lecture about respecting other people’s boundaries, waiting for him. He will listen to that lecture because sales people always take any crap you want to give them because they want to convince you to eventually make a purchase from them. I am usually very respectful to everyone until they cross a boundary that I care about. I thought he crossed the line when he found a way to reach me personally when he couldn’t get through to me at work for business related purposes. Some suppliers have earned my trust enough to where I will give them my personal cell phone number to help facilitate existing business transactions because I trust those individuals. Some of them become friends. But the caller today felt like more of a stalker. I’ve been getting email from him in my work email for several weeks now. If I replied to every potential supplier’s emails to me, it would take up a lot of my time to reply to them all. So the no-reply means “not interested". Most of them figure that out and go away after a few tries via email. Some of them end up getting through to me on my work/office phone and I give them a fair shot by listening to them and discussing their products or services in context of how we may or may not need what they are selling.
Does it look to anyone else here like this guy went too far with his attempts to sell his company’s services by tracking me down personally on my personal phone number? The intrusion is all a result of Google and Apple sharing any kind of information that someone will pay for. Has this happened to anyone else here?