Antibiotics only work for like 3 years on average, and you can't make your money back.

Feynman said getting the prize was the worst thing that ever happened to him.

For what it's worth, I worked in a call center for a number of years when I first started university. I sold supplementary hospital insurance, activated credit cards and attempted to sell balance protection, and even sold vacation packages. There seems to be this common misunderstanding about telemarketers and their feelings about being hung up on.

First of all, the calls are automated and we are told to keep them under a certain length. Secondly, we are randomly monitored and evaluated on our call quality, the primary metric of which is the number of rebuttal attempts we try per call.

A call comes in, and it's "too polite to hang up." We are forced to attempt to rebut you 3 times, or we risk getting evaluated poorly and losing our jobs. We irritate you with our stubborn rebuttals, and you irritate us by wasting our time. At the end of a call we put in a code to signify how the call went. Since these responses aren't watched too closely by our manager, rather than entering a legitimate "not interested" code and hurting our conversion ratio, we (very quickly) schedule another callback in a month or so, and move on to our next call. You get a call back a month later from another agent, and the cycle starts over again.

If you just hang up on us, we call you back anyway, but at least that way we can move on to our next call immediately. You get to see our number on your call display so you can anticipate our call next time, and we don't have to work our asses off trying to rebut your half-hearted attempts at shooting us down.

We get hung up on 100's of times every single day, it doesn't phase us. We hear every single expletive on a daily basis. Nothing you do or say could ever upset us. We don't want to bug you any more than you want to be bugged, but our managers want us to make sales, so they force us to.

Keeping us on the phone is dangerous as well because our call numbers are so high we've heard every possible rebuttal. I know this isn't the case with a lot of telephone salespeople who barely speak English, but at least for me and a few others with real sales abilities, you run the risk of getting hustled into buying our product. Our commission is directly tied to our ability to convert you, whereas you have no incentive or opportunity to get good at not getting hustled. We practice 8 hours a day, every day.

In the end, just say "put me on your do not call list." Don't immediately hang up, wait for them to say okay. If they try to rebut you, say "Put me on your do not call list. If I hear from you again, I will pursue litigation." The telemarketer doesn't care at all about your threats, but all of the calls are recorded, and if you were to actually sue the company the telemarketer knows it would be their ass, so they will definitely put you on their list.

Never ask to speak to a manager or supervisor. We were instructed to just hand the phone off to the person in the cube next to us, and have them pretend to be the supervisor. I was a "supervisor" plenty of times, we were taught to just placate the customer and get them off the phone.