What happens when you annoy me at 2:40am by cold calling me to sell me crap? This...

I don't enjoy being deprived of sleep.  Especially when it's due to moronic fools cold calling me at 2:40am to try to sell me marketing products.  As such, I thought I would share (on ALL my blogs) my complaint letter to the company that rang me:

'Dear VOCUS,

On February 22, 2013, I signed up for HARO.  I was enthusiastic and I compliment you on such a wonderful initiative to assist journalists, experts and bloggers to source or sell their expertise in their fields. 

I especially liked the featured success story on the HARO page with the quote by [retracted], of the [retracted] Company: "Getting this kind of coverage is like winning the lottery.  We have HARO to thank for it".

What I did not know, was that you planned on using the information I provided during my HARO signup to torment me to the height of indignation and vexation while simultaneously ingraining in me a desire to go all Wrath of Khan on your questionable marketing techniques... which, understandably, is about as far from feeling like I'd won the lottery as freaking possible.

I am speaking, of course, of your VOCUS marketing sales representative who cold called me at 2:40am AEST this morning. And your subsequent reply to the tweet I sent you at approximately 3:30am AEST, inviting me to "tell [you] more so [you] can rectify" because you are "sorry to hear this" (RE: my asking "Do you make a habit out of cold calling people at [2:40]am to try to sell your products to, or am I just lucky?").

So, as per your request, I will indeed tell you more about this incident:

Now you'll have to forgive my phone, because when it converts voice to text so it can send me a message (some ten minutes later) to inform me of whom the caller was, it sometimes fails abysmally at the job.  I believe the representative's name was [retracted], though this could be anything from '[retracted]' to 'Ferris Bueller' given the phone's propensity for mistakes.  So please keep that in mind for future communications if you are planning on engaging the standard customer service damage control method of (untruthfully) telling me the person responsible for the call has been disciplined in an effort to placate me.  It will not placate me; it will probably just heighten my irritation given the level of sleep deprivation I am now faced with.

But I digress.  One thing my phone is exceptionally good at is logging call times.  Such as the call I received from you at 2:40am. 

2:40am, VOCUS, 2:40am.

There I was, peacefully sleeping (or as peacefully as one can sleep when one has a two year old child wrapped around their head like a large cat), when out of the darkness my phone began to blast the Big Bang Theory theme song (my poor choice for a ringtone), and loudly vibrate and scuttle its way across my bedside table like a deranged android crab suffering cluster seizures.  Do you know how loud a phone vibrating against wood sounds at 2:40am, VOCUS?  Do you also know that placing your phone on the edge of a bedside table and leaving the vibrate feature on, despite the sound being on, will cause aforementioned phone to scuttle its way off the bedside table and firmly lodge itself in the impossible to reach gap between the bedside table and the window?

Honestly, VOCUS, I thought the apocalypse had arrived. 

The vibrating against the window felt and sounded like trio of fighter jets flying over my house. I live in Melbourne, not downtown Baghdad.  Not cool, VOCUS, not cool.  So between the vibrating window, the Barenaked Ladies shrieking at me, and my own racing heart at the shock of having my REM sleep cycle violated in such a way, I was not impressed. 

But it didn't end there, did it? My two year old child was also woken up by your call, and was understandably startled by the sudden noise.  And by startled I mean she violently jerked her body in surprise, kneeing me in the nose in the process, and began wailing at the top of her lungs as two year olds are prone to doing when they are woken up.

So there I was clutching my throbbing nose and blindly groping for my phone in the approximately 2cm gap between bedside table and window, with a toddler who, by this stage, had morphed into the equivalent of a moderately sized, flailing, screaming octopus.  Ever had an octopus wrap itself around your head, half your face and your left arm while it almost perforates your eardrum with continuous high pitched screaming that rarely drops lower than the approximate noise level one would find at a Marilyn Manson: Antichrist Superstar Tour concert, VOCUS?  No? I assure you, it's not pleasant.

I somehow released her vicelike octopus grip on me, managed to get my phone, and through my watering eyes and nose clutching I caught a glimpse of the number who was calling me before the call ended.

As you can imagine, VOCUS, ones first reaction to a 2:40am phone call is to assume somebody has died or at least been seriously injured.  So when I saw the delightful little +1 as the country code in front of the number ringing me at such an ungodly hour, I was initially relieved.  This relief was short lived however, and it was replaced with a mounting feeling of pure, unadulterated rage at the fact some fool from the US was calling me at that time. 

VOCUS, you owe my swear jar three dollars.

You'll be happy to know that I finally settled my toddler back to sleep though...some four hours after your idiotically timed phone call.  During that time I managed to do some sneaky googling, and discovered that you've annoyed quite a number of people with your cold calling them in an attempt to sell marketing products to them.

Now, being Australian, perhaps we have a distinctly different concept of what is appropriate and what is not compared to US definitions.  So let me spell it out simply for you, VOCUS –

It is not acceptable to ring me at 2:40am. 

You woke me.

You woke my child.

You probably inadvertently woke half the neighbourhood, as my child vocalised her displeasure at being woken up.

I've now lost five hours worth of working time because I have been dealing with a sleep deprived, overly emotional toddler all day.

And you've annoyed me.  A lot.

So now that you have the information you need, I look forward to seeing how you plan on rectifying this/justifying the error/palming me off with generic damage control rubbish to prevent my aforementioned desire to 'go all Wrath of Khan on your questionable marketing techniques'.

He tasks me indeed,

Rebecca Millar.'