Nobody likes cold-calling salespeople—while they have a job to do like everyone else, that job is highly irritating to pretty much everyone involved. Case in point: an Australian office supplies company that bullied a farming couple into purchasing enough ink to last them 1,700 years.
The company, Corporate Office Supplies, was ordered this week by Australia’s Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal to pay more than $ 60,000 USD to a cattle-farming couple, according to a report from the Age.
Salespeople from the company reportedly called the farming couple nonstop starting in mid-2015. Eventually, Charmaine Sharp relented and agreed to buy 56 ink cartridges, but the salespeople apparently continued their campaign. They eventually convinced Sharp to purchase another 1,900 cartridges. (Apparently the payments were made without her husband’s knowledge, which—what a pleasant surprise!) The company then began making “aggressive demands for debt collection,” according to the Age.
In a delicious twist, the company’s CEO, James Murray, has quite a social media presence, including braggadocios photos with some, uh, questionable captions.
Murray has posted gaudy images of himself in cities around the world, interspersed with status updates like “Partying it up with Wiz Khalifa in Vegas” and others like, “Lol seriously can the same old sluts stop complaining on Facebook about the fact they are lonely at Xmas time! No one gives a shit.”
We have a feeling Murray regrets nothing. The company is apparently not challenging the ruling. We’ve reached out to Corporate Office Supplies and Murray for a comment and we’ll update if we hear back.
