Three times this week we’ve received phone calls from Ron Paul’s Campaign For Liberty.  It’s the same woman every time, and every time she asks for Mr. Burt, who has either been A) at work, B) in the middle of a computer game and unwilling unable to talk, or C) sleeping.  The latter occurring on Saturday at a little before 10:30 AM.  Which is a perfectly reasonable time to be asleep on Saturday morning, isn’t it?  And a perfectly reasonable time to be annoyed at someone for calling and interrupting the pursuit of laziness happiness.  Which this call did; as I told the caller for the third time this week that Mr. Burt was unavailable, I heard the tell-tale thumps and creaks upstairs of my husband being startled awake and out of bed by the jarring ring of the phone.

The caller, of course, said she’d call back at a more convenient time (though of course she didn’t ask when that more convenient time might be), so I mentioned — politely — that it was kind of early to be calling people on Saturday morning.

She replied, “Well, I’m at work.”

For a moment I sputtered, casting about my sluggish brain (it was 10:30 on a Saturday morning, after all, and I’d only been up for about an hour myself) for an equally snotty reply, something to the effect of, “Someone’s bitter that she’s calling people who don’t want to talk while other people are sleeping in on Saturday.”  Only I couldn’t get it out before she spat, “Bye,” and hung up on me.

I don’t know if this woman was a paid employee of Ron Paul, or if she was a volunteer for the campaign.  If she was a volunteer and then got crabby about having to work on Saturday morning, then shame on her lack of spirit of volunteerism.  But I don’t really want to rag on her so much as rail against the whole idea of telemarketing.

It’s universally annoying to be interrupted in the midst of whatever you’re doing by an impersonal phone call that puts you on the spot about buying something or committing to some cause.  How is annoying people a remotely effective means of selling your product or cause?  And as if three calls this week from the Ron Paul Campaign For Liberty weren’t enough to annoy me against supporting them in the future, now they’ve been rude to me.  Not a good tactic for a political party struggling to gain followers!

All it makes me want to do is ask to be taken off their calling list.