This post is for my dad, who I think enjoys the amusing stories of me making a fool of myself better than anything else on this blog...
Today I experienced a bit of culture shock (well, culture reminder) at the difference between cold-calling a rural area vs. an urban area.
I spent the day calling various churches and food pantries in Henry County -- where the only "city" is about 9,000 people, and there are fewer than 30,000 people in the whole county -- trying to drum up some interest for an Ohio Benefit Bank informational event coming up in that area.
First of all, it can be hard enough to explain Ohio Benefit Bank over the phone in a single sentence to people who have never heard of it (and are probably still thinking that it's an actual bank...), but harder still when it's a county with virtually no OBB presence and you are cold-calling a tiny pantry staffed by volunteers and probably not used to getting random rambling calls from Toledo.
People are both more trusting ("No he's not here. Would you like his cell phone number?") and more skeptical ("Who are you again?") at the same time. If that makes sense...
There's also more overlap between personal and business.
One food pantry phone number I had turned out to be a lady's home, out of which she single-handedly ran the service. When another number turned out to be a bank, I thought I'd misdialed but it turned out to be where the food bank coordinator worked. Another church didn't give me an email address but said I could send a flyer through the mail if I wanted.
Several agencies appeared to be run by the same person so I tried to be careful about not calling twice.
But I did get tripped up once.
Strikes One and Two came very quickly after the first words I uttered to the kindly elderly woman who picked up the phone at St. Vincent de Paul in Napoleon. I asked for the name of the contact that the food bank in Toledo had on record. We'll call him John Smith.
ME: Hi! Is John Smith available?
WOMAN: (Pause) May I ask who's calling?
ME: My name is Sarah and I work with a statewide outreach project called the Ohio Benefit Bank.
WOMAN: Well, Mr. Smith has actually passed away...
Crap! That's always embarrassing...
But then to make matters worse -- or at least more awkward -- it turns out that I was speaking with his widow...
D'oh!
But I think I said I was so sorry so emphatically that she couldn't help but feel bad for me. She thanked me and patiently humored me by letting me talk haha.
Strike Three came when I finished my spiel about the event and she was actually interested enough to ask where it was going to be held...uh oh!...I didn't even know! Talk about useful basic information... I had an address off the flyer, but realized I didn't know the name of the building or venue...the perfect way to reveal your big-city outsider status and prove you know nothing at all about her town.
I stammered something and she kind of laughed (at me or with me hmm?) and said that's OK, she could just look at the flyer when I sent it and figure it out. (Turns out it's some kind of county goverment complex...at least now I know...)
So that conversation was awkward enough as it was.
But Strike Four came when I dialed that same number later on in my call list! Apparently the site listed twice and I didn't realize it. (But at least this time I didn't ask for Mr. Smith...)
Still. Of all the places to accidentally call back and have her say, "Um, I think I already talked to you about this..." Yep. Good Old Mrs. Smith.
Mrs. Smith thinks I'm a moron.
But at least she remembered me right? Haha.
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