You may think of yourself as a scholar, a diplomat, a sage or a saint, but you are nothing unless it shows.
How unfortunate for those millions of tragic souls that simply weren't given a chance.
I AM NOT SILENT! I've written letters to newsapers, radio, government officials, television personalities, I've drawn political cartoons for newspapers, magazines and periodicals, I've submitted a sitcom screenplay to Bravo, and several others for various competitions throughout the country. I AM NOT SILENT!
I am however a criminal... Well, not really. A company [DataNATIONAL] provides a service of delivering leads (contact information) to marketing companies like my own. Our company signed up for a service from them to acquire an unlimited amount of leads, the only catch was that the leads had to be individually clicked upon in order for them to be downloaded, so the limit to the number of leads you can get was how fast you can click.
By human standards, this would limit the number we could download to around two thousand leads a day. I spoke with our salesman telling him that we had a call center which needed mass amounts of leads to support a staff of 30 call reps, making 600 calls each day. The salesman explained that [DataNATIONAL] needed someway to restrict the dataflow, otherwise the subscribers could download all the records they needed for their lifetime in a month and cancel the service right after. He told me that he could upgrade our service for a monthly fee and we could download en masse, blah, blah, blah...
I forwarded his offer to my supervisor and it was declined after I explained that there was a loophole allowing our company to get as many leads as we pleased. I found that the contract stated that we were entitled to as many leads as we could click, but it didn't prohibit an automated program from doing the clicking. My supervisor was happy to find the [DataNATIONAL]'s little scam wasn't airtight and told me to develop the application to extract the data in bulk.
By the next week I had made a program that accepted filter criteria, accessed [DataNATIONAL]'s lead site, parsed the data, and saved the appropriate leads to a formatted file ready for the dialer. I don't think that this application has any more ethical problems than does the misleading nature of the other company's advertising an "unlimited number of leads" as part of the subscription...
Enough about work!
How unfortunate for those millions of tragic souls that simply weren't given a chance.
I AM NOT SILENT! I've written letters to newsapers, radio, government officials, television personalities, I've drawn political cartoons for newspapers, magazines and periodicals, I've submitted a sitcom screenplay to Bravo, and several others for various competitions throughout the country. I AM NOT SILENT!
I am however a criminal... Well, not really. A company [DataNATIONAL] provides a service of delivering leads (contact information) to marketing companies like my own. Our company signed up for a service from them to acquire an unlimited amount of leads, the only catch was that the leads had to be individually clicked upon in order for them to be downloaded, so the limit to the number of leads you can get was how fast you can click.
By human standards, this would limit the number we could download to around two thousand leads a day. I spoke with our salesman telling him that we had a call center which needed mass amounts of leads to support a staff of 30 call reps, making 600 calls each day. The salesman explained that [DataNATIONAL] needed someway to restrict the dataflow, otherwise the subscribers could download all the records they needed for their lifetime in a month and cancel the service right after. He told me that he could upgrade our service for a monthly fee and we could download en masse, blah, blah, blah...
I forwarded his offer to my supervisor and it was declined after I explained that there was a loophole allowing our company to get as many leads as we pleased. I found that the contract stated that we were entitled to as many leads as we could click, but it didn't prohibit an automated program from doing the clicking. My supervisor was happy to find the [DataNATIONAL]'s little scam wasn't airtight and told me to develop the application to extract the data in bulk.
By the next week I had made a program that accepted filter criteria, accessed [DataNATIONAL]'s lead site, parsed the data, and saved the appropriate leads to a formatted file ready for the dialer. I don't think that this application has any more ethical problems than does the misleading nature of the other company's advertising an "unlimited number of leads" as part of the subscription...
Enough about work!
posted by T.S. Idiot at 11:13 AM
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