Blogtrek

My Experience with Telemarketers

This week a "Do Not Call" list was created listing the names of people who prefer not to be called by telemarketers. These people are to the telephone what spam is to email. There are five ways of communicating, and there is or was junk in all five. The five ways are telephone, with crank calls and telemarketers; US postal service, with junk mail; fax, with junk fax, which was declared illegal a number of years ago; email with spam, and face-to-face. Yes, I have had junk people come to the door selling a variety of products. How do you get rid of them?

Anyway, the Do Not Call list was set up, and the response was tremendous. The site www.donotcall.gov received 1,000 calls a second. At that rate, every household and adult in the United States will be on the list in about two and a half days. The site was made slow by the huge traffic that arrived at it. So what was my experience with telemarketers? About a year ago they got more and more frequent, with frequent hangup calls from "out of area" or from "unavailable". I therefore obtained Call Intercept from Verizon, which intercepts out of area and unavailable calls and makes the caller identify himself before he or she gets answered. That turns off most telemarketers. That is indeed how it worked. The number of telemarketers calling me dropped off to near zero. The only ones I got were those who attempted to get through Call Intercept (there were only one or two), or those who had valid numbers on my caller ID. I found the service too expensive, however, so I dropped it. After that I have still not received many telemarketing calls. About half of them had a valid telephone number on my caller ID. So I will keep Call Intercept off and wait to see if I get more telemarketers. If I do, then I will sign up for the registry.