‘Tis the season to be tortured by robocallers, telemarketers, extortionists and identity thieves… and that season lasts twelve months annually. Obviously, being registered on the national “DO NOT CALL” list means absolutely nothing. Pressing whatever number these bastards oft “offer” to delete our names from their databases serves only one purpose… to assure a barrage of their subsequent calls.
If it were only a few, isolated incidents where I could politely say “not interested” and never be bothered again. But that’s not the case when dealing with a rude ‘tude… best summed up thusly…
Oh yeah? How DARE you refuse me / resist my scam? I will hound you until the day you die and then come after your survivors, too! And you cannot do one damned thing about it!
Neither using my answering machine to field these calls nor totally turning it off resolves the prob. More worrisome… just how much abuse can this equipment take before the digital recorder and/or ringer “burns out”? In the case of the latter these sadists will simply let my phone ring dozens of times per call… and still call back! This has got to be their twisted notion of punishment for anyone who’d dare to deliberately avoid them.
And what about the ill-mannered callers, who do front (more or less) legitimate businesses? What crappy training they had to have received to not comprehend the fine line between persistence and pestering. Indeed, they seem utterly clueless to the fact that nobody can ever high-pressure a customer into buying any product or service. In other words… zero customer respect nets zero bucks.
Worse yet, some of their sales pitch assaults are also insults… e.g., they’ll ofttimes claim they’re calliing back because I had requesed they do so. Their implication being what? That I must be feeble-minded if I don’t remember doing so? And then what? I’m supposed to pretend to remember something that never, ever happened? And then what? Knuckle under to mindlessly buy whatever crap they’re peddling?
I have complained to my service provider. When they informed me that the majority of such calls originate from outside my homeland’s borders I allowed them block all international calls… to no avail. And since (obviously) the problem is also domestic, I’m now considering having the phone company permanently pull the plug on my landline. HOWEVER… this is the one and only phone number that has ever been in my family’s name… dating back to 1958! Yep, those seven digits are the very same ones I committed to memory as a four-year-old!
And all sentimentality aside… landline service could, someday, be a lifesaver. My experiment during August 2003’s Northeast Power Grid Crash, had proven that my cell, held mere inches away from my regular phone could not get it to ring even once.
So… down to my last option is where I’m at. I’ll now be treating my landline like my cell… “turning it on” / plugging it in ONLY when I need to place an outgoing call. Of course, the real kick in the ass is how I’ll still be paying my phone company full price for far less than full service.
Forced into social isolation because robocallers, telemarketers, extortionists and identity thieves flat-out refuse to take my flat-out “NO!” for an answer.
CommonSenseTom 