I'd never really thought about until now, but do Chinese (specifically mandarin speaking) 3 year olds use Ma in place of the English speaking equivalent of "why" (repeated ad nauseum until the adult being questioned snaps!)?

Had they not escaped they may have become the First Ministroni

"Tell HR I want them to know it was me"

Turtle involved unscheduled foot resectioning

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Nice to see a British food section actually filled with British food, had a (German) colleague excitedly show me the Tennessee BBQ sauce he'd bought from the "British" section of a local super market, he was sad when I told him it wasn't authentic, or British.

Also, Typhoo and PGTips, but no Yorkshire Tea, shameful! ;)

The world will always need exterminators

It's "Golf with your Friends" not "Golf with your Comrades"!

This is an excellent way of screening. The company I worked for was an opt-in service. So all people being called had at some point agreed to it (though most forget ticking the box on a form or whatever, which is totally understandable), and we therefore had their names, so it wouldn't have worked for what we were doing. But yes if a cold-caller doesn't know who they're calling then it's a good indication you don't need what they're offering.

I heard a podcast with Scott Hanselman (a technologist in the US) and he had a phone system where you had to say the name of the person you wanted to an automated gate-keeper, which sounded like a really cool system, and similar to the sort of screening you're doing.

I mean, I was good with people hanging up during the spiel. Saying "sorry I'm not interested" is more than fine and likely to put you on the upper end of calls that's day. Swearing or getting upset isn't acceptable and fails to recognise that neither of you want to be on that call.

However telemarketing has a better response rate than paper based surveys, and the data is used to drive decision making. A lot of people complain when things don't work out for you - like local council decisions on new amenities, but if you don't submit your opinion you can't be heard. It's not perfect but it is used to define a surprising number of things.

Wrt to you MIL, yeah, it's not nice to be on the recieving end of hostility, I get it can be annoying but as I implied above nobody chooses the job, I personally had to take whatever I could get and I was too young/not out of work long enough for JSA (plus JSA is a pain to get anyway, but that's a whole different story).

Cold calling telemarketing ("Do you have time to answer some questions about x?"). Felt grotty with every call (got yelled at a lot too, be nice to people who call they likely don't want to call you any more than you want to receive the call), lasted 2-weeks.

Swapped out to data entry of paper responses into a spreadsheet, was so much better but only lasted 2 days before I went back to the phones. Am verg grateful I don't have to do that any more.

Haha, I always suspected!

Amazing, thank you for this comprehensive list :)