I just don't get it

[altivo]

When you deliberately omit your phone number from contact information for something, you deliberately did not check the "call me for xyz" boxes, and the number is on do not call, what in the name of heaven and earth makes anyone think they should hunt up the number and call you about it? I don't give a shit in the woods that they think they are "exempt" from do not call. Having your number on that list is a very clear statement that you do not welcome such calls, no matter who they are from.

Yet they call, begging for money, wanting to rattle off political or other arguments. And they call after 9 pm local, which is illegal for anyone making such calls to do. Or they call during the dinner hour. And they block their identity on caller ID or use a cell phone to hide their identity. I should give money to someone like that? What kind of fool do they think I am? Worst of all are the politicians with their tape recorded phone calls. They made it illegal for anyone else to use tape recordings, but they exempted themselves of course. So you don't even get the pleasure of telling anyone off, because it's just a machine. And some of them dial back if you hang up too soon. This is really an effective way to influence people, you idiots. You'll influence them in the opposite direction. Or are you just pretending to be on one side in order to shove people away from that side and toward yourself? It gets disgustingly devious when you think about it, and since they block their identity, you can do nothing about it. Actually, I hold the phone to the speaker on the answering machine to make a feedback squeal that usually gets their stupid machine to terminate the connection.

My undergraduate college has found my e-mail address somehow. God knows I never gave it to them. They are sending as many as four messages a day trying to get me to donate money, or buy tickets to this or that event. Never mind that I live 400 miles away and haven't been back there in decades. Never mind that I have never donated money to them and never will. In spite of federal law, their messages contain no information about how to get them to stop sending this crap. When they started, there was a URL that was supposed to unsubscribe you, but it never worked. It either got a database malfunction or a scripting error when you tried to use it, or later, you just got a 404 page not found. Now the link has disappeared. I'm done with them, I just added their entire domain to my spam filter so anything they send goes right into the trap. I suspect this is a result of having mentioned them on Facebook once or twice by name. Yet another indication that Facebook is not a nice place to do anything that might identify you.

It seems that we have entered an era of universal rudeness and disrespect for privacy.

Comments

[hrrunka]

Yeah, I've been getting more unsolicited calls of late, despite being on the do-not-call list. Irritating; more so because my answering machine, which used to deter some of them, was a casualty of my recent re-decoration project. I must get a replacement...

[altivo]

We used to pay extra for a telephone company service that blocked calls from unidentified numbers. This was good when telemarketers were blocking their identities while most others were not. Now so many people use cell phones, which are always unidentified, that the service was worthless.

When the US first established "do not call" the result was a couple of years of peace. Now the telemarketers and telebeggars have figured out that there's no actual enforcement, so they are ignoring it completely.

[avon-deer.livejournal.com]

The last time I was called by repo men (they were really after the previous occupant of my house) I felt like telling them that if they called again I would "hunt you down, pluck out your eyeballs, and feed them to you; you f**k. (1) Well; apparently that is illegal. And yet calling me despite telling them not to is not. You can't win can you.

(1) Totally unlike me, I know. I guess that proves that everyone has their breaking point.

[hrrunka]

Repo men seem to have to be particularly dense; must be in the job description, or something. "Candidates with an ability to understand simple phrases need not apply."

[avon-deer.livejournal.com]

I think it's far more sinister than that. Their brief is to get the cash back by hook or crook. I think they feel that if they harrass (as Go Debt did to me) a homeowner enough they might pay the debt off FOR the debtor just to get rid of the debt agency.

[hrrunka]

I suspect you're on the nail, there. :(

[schnee]

I'm just curious... are there any phones that could be set up to only ring when there's a call from a known, whitelisted caller ID? Ideally, the phone would make it easy to toggle between this mode and the regular "everyone can call" one.

I've never heard of anything like that, but I'm sure there would be a market for it.

[farthing]

Every time I get a new phone, I always try to find a way to set a ring tone for callers with blocked IDs. No luck with Nokia phones so far, though I think I heard it does exist on some other brand phone.

For whitelisting, one trick with Nokia phones (and others that support caller groups) is to set the default ring tone to silent (or a recording of one second of silence), put all the whitelisted under a caller group, and set a separate (not silent) ring tone for that group. It would blink the lights though, but at least it would be quiet for the unknowns.

Or in reverse, put all the troublemakers under their own group, and set a silent ring tone for'em. Just put another telemarketer under that group on my phone. :-)

Too bad there's no easy way to do this, but at least there's some way.

[schnee]

For whitelisting, one trick with Nokia phones (and others that support caller groups) is to set the default ring tone to silent (or a recording of one second of silence), put all the whitelisted under a caller group, and set a separate (not silent) ring tone for that group. It would blink the lights though, but at least it would be quiet for the unknowns.

Ah, yes, that works. :)

Or in reverse, put all the troublemakers under their own group, and set a silent ring tone for'em. Just put another telemarketer under that group on my phone. :-)

Mmm, yeah, but most phones I've encountered only have a limited of storage for these things, and you're also playing a game of whack-a-mole then. It's better than nothing, of course, but far from ideal.

[farthing]

Yeah, I'm getting only about half of the telemarketers with that system. I guess living in a small country, and me trying to keep my phone number semi-secret helps a bit. It would be totally useless against, say, Statesian telemarketers.

[schnee]

*noddles* Mmm, yeah. (I'm curious, too — what small country is that?)

[farthing]

Ah, Finland. Got plenty of Nokia phones here. :-)

[schnee]

Ah, OK. ^^

[altivo]

Such phones exist, both as cell phones and as landlines. The problem is that so many numbers in the US are now unlisted and unidentified, it becomes a sort of crap shoot.

[schnee]

Crap shoot?

[altivo]

Sorry. American slang referring to the casino (or street illegal) gambling game of craps (also called dice.) So getting it right (or not) is no more likely than winning at dice.

[schnee]

Ah, OK!

Hmm, how wouldn't a phone that simply doesn't ring at all unless a known, whitelisted caller ID is being transmitted not work, though? Granted, you might actually miss calls from people (or businesses) that you don't have whitelisted that way, which would create its own set of problems, but it should stop phone spam dead in its tracks.

[altivo]

Because caller ID has become unreliable in the US. It doesn't always tell you the number, or the name. Instead it gives useless things like "local call" or "out of state call" or "Indiana call." I suspect this is due to the proliferation of phone companies who are not particularly cooperative with one another and feel they owe nothing to someone else's customer.

Neither a white list nor a black list will be very effective under these circumstances.

[schnee]

Ah, so someone might actually have turned on their caller ID-forwarding yet still not have their number show up correctly?

That sucks, and yes, I agree — under those circumstances, you've probably already lost.

[altivo]

Yes, we've lost a lot, including a lot of beautiful scenery. You can stand on a hill where you can see five or six cell phone towers and yet find you have no connection available because your phone belongs to the wrong carrier who doesn't have agreements with any of the companies who own those towers. This isn't supposed to happen, but it does. In the last decade, regulations that were irritating to businesses went mostly unenforced. Consequently we all get to suffer now.

[schnee]

*noddles* How many different cell phone networks do you have?

[altivo]

Depends on how you count, I'm sure. The ones who actually own towers, or include the ones who buy time on towers owned by others? I really have no idea.

It has certainly uglified the landscape though.

[schnee]

Hmm, I meant the ones running their own networks — not companies piggy-backing on / reselling others' networks. (According to Wikipedia, there's 20, but a couple of these are apparently "virtual" network operators, so they don't really count. For comparison, in Germany, there's four competing networks, not counting the "virtual" ones (of which there's far too many to list, anyway).)

[altivo]

As I said, I have no real idea. These companies merge and spin off divisions constantly. Two of the big names in my area were Cellular One and Xingular, both of which were eaten alive by others and I don't know who off-hand.

Then there's Sprint, which operates two mutually incompatible networks on its own now that it ate Nextel.

Some of the names that Wikipedia lists as "including" under other names are not actually owned by the network operator, as far as I know, but rather by others who lease shared time.

It's not a topic that I pay much attention to, really. Telephones in general, and cell phones in particular, irritate me more than they interest me.

[moonhare]

Oh, I empathize. We get calls from banks, not just to yell about past-dues, but to offer 'deals' and such. I won't answer calls that are listed as 'private,' and I run the 1-800 calls through anywho.com or one of those "whose calling me?" sites just to see who is pestering me.

Hey, Bill Clinton called me... no kidding, the guy said "This is Bill Clinton and I'd like to..." Yes, I hung up, it was a recording by some Dem group, and it irritated me on many different levels.

Facebook has privacy issues. Everytime they change the site it becomes harder to find where to block stuff (for me... I'm hating facebook lately).

Good luck ;o)

[altivo]

Around here it's always Republicans who pull the tape recorded call stunts. Probably because they have something like an 80% majority in this county, which makes me wonder why they think they need to make cold calls at all. But anyway, the local state senator has these tape recorded calls that go off to tell you that she is about to hold a meeting somewhere. Like I'm going to drop everything and rush down there, wherever there is. I guess I'm supposed to be impressed, but no one who uses automated dialing equipment to play tape recorded messages impresses me. They just make me dislike them intensely.