Sometimes I feel guilty about being mean to people over the phone, when they’re only doing their job. This morning I’m having a harder time with that, but I think it’s just because I’m physically exhausted.

When you have a business that’s actually registered with a license bureau you get a lot of people calling offering you supposedly great deals on things that aren’t all that great. You get credit card machine offers, those are consistently the ones that I get, those and the online yellow pages. They’re always wanting you to upgrade listings that you didn’t even ask for and half the time they don’t even exist.

A gentleman called me just now from local.com wanting to “update my listing” at first I couldn’t tell what the name was he was using it sounded like loco.com and when I googled that given he caught me when I was sitting at my laptop it wasn’t a listing, so that got my ire up a bit and I asked him to spell the name of his company and looked them up. He was telling me that they had me listed under “lodgings” and I told him I was a psychic and a clairvoyant and I googled psychic’s in my area through their service and came up with three listings the first of which was me, but was using my old number from before we moved. I told him I could see that I was already listed, and that he should just edit that listing to reflect the new phone number, rather than putting in a separate listing.

He seemed a little put off that I was looking up the site. I told him that I get a lot of phone calls from companies essentially trying to extort money from me for services which are relatively useless, so I make a habit of checking up on them when they call.

He continued on explaining that they were just interested in putting me ahead of the competition and that if I was able to they could upgrade my listing to help me rise above everyone else. Now I was looking right at the listing for all the psychics within a certain area of my zip code and there’s only three others, and they’re listed alphabetically so I’m actually the top listing. I told him that and hung up.

I understand that he’s doing his job, but it frustrates me that they do these things. I’m already paying $20 a month for a listing in our local yellow pages which is both in the book and online, and you know how many interested client calls I’ve had brought to me by that? One. One call, and I’ve been listed since last October.

Other calls I get are either crank calls from people who think it’s funny to recite lines from Snow White to me, or people who think that I’m some sort of hardware store even though I’m listed under “psychics” and get all huffy when I can’t sell them doors or windows or cut glass for them.

I have an advantage really because I automatically know that they’re not someone whose a client because when they call they ask for me by my first name, and I use my middle name in the adverts I put out, on all my business cards and here on the website. It’s like when people call and ask for my husband by his full first name rather than the nickname that anyone else uses.