This morning I got what started off as a typical solicitation call – someone wanted to speak to me about sending a donation to their organization.  This wasn’t a personalized call, it was one of those automatic calls when you know they’re going through the phone book.  Anyway, the person on the phone informed me that I had made a pledge that I hadn’t yet paid, and belligerently told me to send them money. 

Now, I’m pretty careful about making pledges and I’m also pretty careful to send  payment promptly for any financial commitments.  We have checkbook used exclusively for charitable donations and all requests or pledges that we get in the mail are put to the side to either be paid right away or if it’s something I don’t remember committing to, I check with my husband to be sure that he did.  (Because I keep a separate checkbook for this, it’s also very easy for me to check when someone calls and asks me to match a previous donation from an earlier time – within a few seconds I can run through the dates and see if it’s there or not, and sadly, a lot of the time, the claims have been inaccurate.)  I rarely give pledges over the phone unless it’s an organization I’m familiar with, and I even more rarely donate to an unknown overseas organization since I try to keep my charity dollars directed towards local needs.

While I didn’t remember making any pledge to this organization overseas, knowing that things can slip between the cracks, I asked when the pledge was made.  November 2006, he said.  And then I made another pledge in October 2007.  Hmm.  They’re calling me almost three years after I first made the pledge?  I told him that I didn’t recall doing that – and it’s not consistent with how I handle my money, because I wouldn’t spend more money ‘on credit’ before paying for everything outstanding.   He insisted that I promised them money, was breaking my promise, and was costing their organization money because they kept sending me envelopes .  He said I had an obligation to them and demanded that I keep my promises. 

This was an interesting (though offensive) approach to take, I thought.  I’m not very responsive to charitable organizations aggressively making demands as if they were bill collectors.  I told him to avoid wasting any further envelopes on me and for the sake of absolute clarity, that I was officially revoking my supposed pledge.  He told me I couldn’t do that, that I had to fulfill my commitment and pay for what I had cost them.  I incredulously asked him if he wanted me to send a check for a dollar to cover the cost of the envelope.  He aggressively told me that they had sent me 18 envelopes (not one single one that I recall receiving, and I check all the mail) and I owed them $1.50 for each one.  

At this point I was pretty fed up and I politely ended our conversation, though he kept yelling as I hung up. (I try very hard not to hang up on telemarketers or soliciters, because as fellow human beings they’re deserving of respect – but if they insist on continuing a discussion after it’s clearly over, I  let them know that I’m unable to continue speaking to them and then say ‘good bye’.)   A minute later, the phone rang, and it was the same man calling back!  As soon as I answered he verbally accosted me and said I call myself a religious person but I’m breaking Torah laws because I’m lying and stealing from them.  Can you say emotional manipulation and guilt tripping?  I told him he was being presumptuous about my religiousity since I certainly didn’t discuss that with him, and told him he needed to be more careful about his own behavior (he said he wasn’t religious – I didn’t think that was an excuse as I’ve never believed that only a religious person can be a decent human being!). 

I suggested he stop yelling for a minute, and asked him if he felt his approach was an effective way to convince me to donate to his cause.  He told me that I wasn’t going to give them money anway because I was a dishonest person.  He told me again that I clearly wasn’t a religious person (because of my behavior), and ‘G-d will punish you for this’.  I told him I guaranteed that I would never donate a penny in the future to their cause because of him and it would be a very good idea to make sure my name was taken off their list.  I really did hang up at that point – there’s just a limit to how long you can try to be polite!

I know that times are tough financially right now for individuals and organizations, but being verbally abusive to potential donors isn’t, well, it’s just not smart! 

Avivah