“How are you?” asks the voice on the line.

Cheery enough greeting, right? Note of sympathy and concern in a cold and callous world? Harbinger of a pleasant and fulfilling chatfest on the old telephone, all that?

Hmmm?

Not bloody likely. Not anymore. “How are you,” to the wary phone user of the ’90s, has all the lyric promise of the click of the safety catch in a dark alley. No longer a greeting, it’s a warning. You, with your fist around the receiver and the goofy, expectant grin on your face, have just fallen prey to a telemarketer.

It’s not only that I don’t think telemarketers give a damn how I am. It’s not that I fear I might lose them if I begin explaining about the hemorrhoids, or that nasty patch of athlete’s foot, or what an idiot I was to bite down below the cuticle again.

It’s not just— though now we’re getting warm — that when I hear “How are you” I envision all those desolate training sessions in which the sweaty denizens of telemarketing middle management lick their cigar stubs and disclose to new recruits the pinheaded psychostrategy of the trade (“Be sure to ask ’em how they are! That’ll have ’em eating out of your hand!”). And it’s not just that I resent being called by my first name by somebody I’ve never met, somebody who’s basically interested in selling me a cemetery plot. “How are you,” indeed.

And you know what? It’s not even just that I’m repulsed by the telemarketing industry’s sordid association with fraud — especially that perpetrated on the elderly. The junk jewelry you might get if you spend $598 over seven months on vitamin pills. The sleazy tricks for finding out credit-card numbers of the credulous, all the scams for prying into personal financial records so that drafts ooze from your account to theirs without your knowledge. Fraud on a scale of $40 billion annually, according to widely published estimates.

This appalls and nauseates me. But it isn’t just that.

 It’s…”Riiiiiing. Riiiiiing. Riiii—” Me (getting up from the dinner table and the hot food on my plate, the beginnings of a relaxed, end-of-day conversation with my wife and sons, and clomping the length of the house. Or me, wresting my attention from the train of thought I’ve tortuously developed on an intense, deadline-drenched afternoon): “Hello?” 

“Is this, uh, Donald Power? Don? Don, how are you!?” 

How am I? How the goddam hell am I? 

I’ll tell you how I am. I am suddenly a human warhead. I’m Travis Bickle in the final scene of Taxi Driver, I’m a Menace II Society. My medullae are pumping whitecapped adrenaline into my nervous system. I’m a creature of reddened vision, programmed for vengeance. I am pissed off — by this telephone call. And you?

See, I don’t want them to call me, none of them. Not the nightcrawling scam artists. Not the factotums of the so-called “legitimate” telemarketing industry, the one that racked up $500 billion in revenues in 1994, up from a piffling $250 billion in 1991. The one that employs four million people nationwide, with 300,000 solicitors making 18 million calls daily. See, I don’t accept that there is such a thing as a “legitimate” telemarketing industry. I don’t want my telephone used as an advertising or sales conduit by anybody. Period.

But what choice do I have? Clearly I’m in a minority here. The idea that anyone in his right mind tolerates this legalized harassment at all — much less enriches it to the tune of half a trillion dollars a year — fills me with wonder. I wonder, for instance, if this is the same bunch of red-blooded Americans that likes to get all huffy and bellicose about the intrusiveness of creeping socialism and Big Brother and on-our-backs government. Is it somehow better when it’s Big Capitalism hounding us to distraction in our own homes, rooting around in our personal financial systems, stealing us blind?

Our state, like American governance in general, does not see telemarketing as inherently a nuisance. Elliott Berg, an Assistant Attorney General in Montpelier, is quick to assert that Vermont aggressively pursues and prosecutes cases of outright criminal conduct — repeated, persistent harassment and consumer fraud — from the Phoneheads.

That’s nice. Oh yeah, and you can also sue. Lots of luck. But lacking in this society is any organized grassroots resistance to the philosophical notion of telemarketing. Are we that drunk on consumerism? Ten years ago this form of techno-hucksterism was virtually unknown. Now it has saturated us and further coarsened our private lives. Social critics are already imagining a time when, in the words of G.W. Guswelle, writing in the Atlanta Constitution, “the world is going to be one gigantic party line — everywhere on earth computers will be dialing relentlessly through every phone number in 10,000 cities, offering things for sale.”

Few people are listening to such warnings. (Maybe they’re busy answering the phone.) Michael Gartner in USA Today recently declared that “stopping people from being bothered by salesmen isn’t a function of government.”

The hell it isn’t. The telemarketing salesman enjoys an advantage over me that borders on the coercive. If I don’t want to read the junk catalogues glutting my mailbox every day — intrusion enough — I can throw them away. But when my phone rings, I’m going to stop what I’m doing and answer it, because I don’t know who’s on the other end of the line. It may be a life-and-death call. It may be a friend or a student. It may be — call me a dreamer — someone who wants to give me money.

But when it’s some robotic voice that says, after a pause to double-check the computer printout list, “Ron? How are you?” then I want to say, “Would you mind holding please — until we write a law that gets you and your company the hell out of my private life?” Then I’ll tell you how I am. I’m doing just fine. 

This article appears in Fall Performing Arts Preview • 1995.