...By which I mean a guy who keeps calling my boss's office. I work for a politician, so we get a lot of constituent calls of widely varying levels of importance and coherence. Recently, we've been getting a lot of calls from a guy who... well, talks my ear off for half an hour, goes off on tangents when asked simple, direct questions, and claims to be being persecuted by corrupt law enforcement officials but despite having rambled at me for probably 3 hours in total by now has never once said what they did. Today he called to make sure we'd seen a letter he emailed us, and when I asked him the aforementioned simple, direct questions (for the third time- he called the Friday before last, asked him the questions twice in that call, and didn't get an answer in forty minutes of talking), he said the answer was in the letter, and he'd put in links to model legislation. The answer was not in the letter, and there were seven or eight links in the letter, all of them completely irrelevant to the subject he allegedly wanted addressed (one outright gave me a 404 error), interspersed with a lot of rambling about things he'd already rambled about to me three or four times, mostly the fact that he was being persecuted and persecuting people is bad. I'm not going to quote it because that would be unethical, but long story short, to my highly inexpert eye, it looks like low-key word salad. My usual "please tell me what you're calling about and I'll make sure it gets to my boss" scripts don't work, nor does "these are the things my boss said we can do about your problem, and we will do the best we can to do them," because he just tells me about the problem again. Does anyone have any tips for dealing with this guy?
Newspapers get strange calls too (though I don't recall any quite like that -- usually the people with obsessions send repeated letters or emails with voluminous "documentation" that makes no sense). I was expected to consult my editor, who had authority to cut people off, or we'd agree on what I could say to discourage him. But maybe politicians are more squeamish about shutting off voters than editors are about subscribers.
I've asked my boss, but we both thought he'd be satisfied after I called him back and let him talk (call before this one, when he talked my ear off for 40 minutes while I asked the questions related to what we could actually do, then played computer solitaire and made vaguely encouraging noises), and this was clearly not the case. I sent Boss another message about the call yesterday but haven't heard back yet. His pet issue is something that's worth doing something about (even if it's not actually happening in the way or on the scale he thinks it is, I don't know), and some of the people he name-dropped seemed like they might be more coherent, but I'm not convinced that doing something directly addressing it would actually get him to stop calling and emailing. He keeps saying he wants a federal investigation into something, and I'm kind of, "My boss has exactly as much ability to make that happen as you do."
That sorta reminds me about this lady who called at my old job and got very emotional, and very off-topic, about how the city had to come fix the road outside her house. "And you tell them..."
Have you shown your boss the letter yet? I'm afraid I have no advice beyond "you should probably show your boss the letter if this is not a thing you have already done," but witnessed.
hella witnessed. my SO works in Schumer's office and some of the callers he has to deal with.........
