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Dave Barry Strikes Back Against Telemarketers
ikkonoishi writes "The Miami humor columnist Dave Barry in his column
here encouraged his readers to exercise their constitutional rights to call a telemarketing firm which had declared the National Do Not Call List unconstitutional. Well it seems to have worked." Needless to say, the targets of the prank were none so keen on being called themselves.
I have oftened wished that I could do what Dave Barry has done. Particularly annoying are the recorded messages that I continue to get on m business line. On occasion I have called the 800 numbers to express my displeasure. Simply calling in ones and twos isn't going to work. What we really need is for someone to organize a web site where people can report these incidents. If we all band together and call these companies 800 numbers simply to express our viewpoint then maybe this activity will become too expensive for companies to exploit anymore. Anyone up for it?
This is cool, and beautifully ironic, but...
Telemarketers don't make money answering phones, they make money calling people. They don't have to answer phones to make money. So this probably didn't actually put a dent in thier operation.
Everything seemed to be going so nice
'till the end of all beings punched right through the ice
Why are the telemarketing companies worried? This list of people who do not wish to be called, are probably people who wouldn't buy anything from them in the first place. This list should be welcomed as it prevent them from making 30 million calls on which they will not make any money on.
In most every state, dialing machines are illegal except when used by non-profits -- this might even be federal law now. This is why the occasional commercial message you get from a dialing machine is usually "[Sleazy company who does this and offers this] is calling to be sure you know about some charity event! [Sleazy company continues pitch about their products]"
Good luck even finding a dialing machine, by the way. I don't think they're even being produced anymore, but rather being traded and sold second-hand. You'll see them go for upward of $10k on ebay now and again.
For those of you too lazy to read the articles, here's the phone number to call: /. their phone system!
1-877-779-3974
Let's
--Quentin
I agree, While Telemarketers are annoying as hell, It is not that hard to simply say "No, I'm not interested" and hang up. Going off on stupid rants, insulting the caller and driving the unemployment rate skywards, achieves nothing but economic instability.
Interfered with somebody's ability to make a living? Since when is that a right? If I've got a business model of strangling small children (or something legal thats equally offensive), other people have a right hinder me in anyway they legally can.
Profit is not its own justification. Thats the sort of thinking that arms dealers and the RIAA use (like how I tied those together?).
Mod point free since 2001
We had recorded the message from 1-800-call-spy about (13 years ago) and put that on our answering machine. One of my roommates still has that and assures me that no-one call him the second time around. (Assuming a live person listens to that message).
I'm not sure if the number is still active (I don't live in the US anymore) and I'm not sure how serious the response of the Home Land Security (or who ever runs that number) is. Dial at your own risk!
grinning, ducking and running...
We're sorry you have reached a number that has been disconnected or is not in service. If you feel you have reached this recording in error, please check your number and try your call again.
Mid-Eastern Pennsylvania Gaming Convention
But what do you do when they call you using the terminally broken "predictive dialing hardware"
You answer and there's nobody in the call centre available so you get a silent call. I've had 5 of these in one day. As the caller id is blocked I can't even discover which set of brain dead idiots it is calling.
Don't bother, you'll only get a recording saying the number has been disconnected.
or rather a new stability where everyone is happier. telemarketers don't have to put up with crap because they lost their jobs; instead they go save the rain forests. and i don't have to get 3 calls per day from the same company trying to sell me the same thing every day that I am home telecommuting. (my guess is that they call on the days I'm not there, too, but I can't hear the phone on those days...).
but in the end you're just sinking to the telemarketers' level.
;-)
Although I agree with you in principle, I think you missed the bigger issue...
The Telemarketers insist that they have a constitutionally protected right to harass us, even after we have added our names to a federally-maintained list saying that we would really rather not have them call us.
This mass calling, while superficially petulant, demonstrates that a right to call and harass people works both ways, if they want to play that game.
Think of this as no different than signing Ralsky up for every junkmail catalog in the world... While childish, it does get the message across - "We hate you and everything you do, so please shrivel up and die, preferably in some painful manner that involves your loathesome occupation". Well, perhaps not quite that verbose, but they get the idea.
Is this really something that needs to be worsened by giving ideas to the industrious - but idle-minded masses on slashdot? The damage can only be worsened here!
Oh, Pshaw! I expect we'll reach 70 or 80 comments before someone thinks to post the home phone numbers of various telemarketing company's CEOs (hint, hint, c'mon, someone out there has those suckers, post em!).
Do the ends justify the means? No.
Hey, the telemarketers already presented a number of points describing why we have a right to call and harass them. We all just want to congratulate them for their hard work. And hey, since the DNC registry would cost them two million jobs, if enough of us keep calling, perhaps they can re-hire those two million to field the inbound calls. So you see, we have simply found a way, by all pulling together, to save two million jobs in an otherwise bad economy.
Using the internet seems like a much more effective method.
With today's computer hardware it would be trivial to just whip together a program which would do the calling.
Then you could just distribute the program on a blog of some sort.
On your blog you could coordinate the readers to set their software to call certain numbers at certain times.
Better yet.
You could have you software automatically check you web site to see if there are any 'Call Worthy' events.
Maybe when people sign up for account they have a preferences section which they can choose the type of events or companies which their software should call.
Anyway you get the picture.
The ends always justify the means.
If you think otherwise it usually means you either havent thought out what the ends actually are or what the consequences of the means are. Almost everytime some says the ends don't justify the means, they wind up using examples where the ends are really crappy.
Your own example of abortion clinic bombings, is a perfect example of the non applicability of that pithy maxim. The clinic bombers are people that are out to kill people thay feel are no longer human. This isn't a means that will accomplish the stated end. It is not about right to life (Ask yourself how in hell someone who bombs a place where pregnant women congregate figures they are protecting the unborn ?)
In the case of telemarketers, the end is to put them out of business, the means is to make them feel the pain they inflict on others. I have no trouble with this especially seeing as its sunday morning and I have received 3 solictations for new credit cards so far today.
i've been told by several salesweasels that they love seeing a 'no soliciting' or 'no salesmen' sign because those people lack the time/motivation/temperment to say *no*. if you were really good at telling the salesperson 'no' and leave, don't comeback, don't call back, etc, they wouldn't need the sign.
probably the easiest people in the world to see to are the people on the do not call list.
eric
My, what a crafty troll. I think I'll bite.
I can see the immediate appeal of this kind of puerile action, but in the end you're just sinking to the telemarketers' level.
Ok, so here your basicly saying that what the people who called the telemarketing group did basicly the same thing that the telemarketing group did, pick up a phone and call someone. Because thats what the telemarketers say, we are just calling you.
Dave has interfered with these people's ability to make a living.
You I could come back with something on this but Dave allready did it so well, I'll just quote him: "Of course, you could use pretty much the same reasoning to argue that laws against mugging cause unemployment among muggers," he wrote. "But that would be unfair. Muggers rarely intrude into your home."
Do the ends justify the means? No. This is the kind of dangerous thinking that brings abortion clinic bombings, the ongoing fighting between northern and southern Ireland, the danger in the Middle East, and countless other bloodbaths.
You go from talking about ends justfying means, and your argument there is weak at best, to bloodbaths? Unless someone was beaten over the head with a phone I don't think any blood has been spilled here.
Dave's had his fun and done his damage.
Ahhh, the "damage". Well again back to the orignal point we basicly now have a law that says that if you sign up for the National Do-Not-Call list that these people can't call you. Such as it is you could then argue that that law is doing "damage" to them. I mean it will, hopefully, reduce the number of calls that a "business" like this one can make and thus force it to lay off or close up shop totally. But, we as a people have decided that we want to be able to control who calls our phones that *we pay for*. And on top of all that, this company has said that it's unconstutional for such a law to exist! Now IANAL, much less a consitintuonal scholar but if any of these lowlifes could please point out to me where the right to protect a buissness model exists I'll be glad to take my words back. Such as it is however that is simply not the case.
Laugh if you must, but sit back and don't make this any worse than it already is!
I did laugh, thank you. How my "sitting back" when I did it made it worse I'm still a little confused about.
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
Can you get in legal trouble for instigating a DOS attack on someones phone system......??? Well, Alice, here in wonderland you can get in hot water for just discussing certain forbidden subjects (circumvention tech, etc)....
Now, I assume you were trying to be funny, but clearly some tool on here took you seriously and modded your post interesting instead of funny, so I'll reply.
Good. Let people lose their jobs. Interfere with their attempt at making a living. If they inconvenience me one iota, I couldn't care less in the slightest if every last person there lost their job. Its a job. They can get other ones. If they can't, well our government has shown we'll bend over backwards to support people with no ability or desire to support themselves.
They choose to call me, they choose to inconvenience me and you or they claim their ability to make a living should matter? Thats funny beyond words. What if these were ignorant asshats sending 50 million spam messages a day? Would shutting them down be bad because its going to put some people out of work?
Well, it was surely just as easy for them to say "Sorry I'm not interested" when people called to voice their opinions. Answering the phone is not always convenient. It's impolite to call people and then try to sell them something. I'm quite happy with a tit for tat retaliation.
PRESS RELEASE - FOR IMMEDIATE DISTRIBUTION
Due to the outstandingly positive response to recent media events, the American Teleworking Association has taken steps to protect its constitutional right to protection from unsolicited calls by registering with the National Do Not Call List.
"We were shocked by the intrusiveness of these unsolicited calls", commented Tim Searcy, ATA Executive Director. "None of us could get any work done! Our heartfelt thanks to the Federal Government for their foresight in creating such a resource to protect people like us!"
Returning to work today, ATA employees are looking forward to a day of uninterrupted work now that they are protected from such intrusive unsolicated calls.
Don't think that the telemarketters don't know their own business.
Alas, I fail to see how calling someone non-stop could be anything but non-profit. It's not cheap to call nowadays.
Even if you only get a recorded message, they pay toll fees for every incoming call. Once you start hearing a busy signal, their cost is zero.
Livelyhood? Let me guess, you're one of the people spamming or phoning millions of people who don't want to know about the crap you're peddling. You see it as your right to intrude on people's time and privacy in a sad attempt to make money selling something someone else creates the value for. Maybe you consider yourself an entrepruneur, but you're a bottom feeder at best - go get a real job and stop pissing people off for a living.
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
Dave's not the only one pissed at telemarketers. Here's what I propose we do to them. Of course, this is probably the best solution.
The PC Weenies: 11 Years of Online Tech 'Too
But in a guy sort of way.... and "The National Do Not Call List" sounds like a great name for a Rock & Roll Band.
Too lazy to create a sig...
Not to be left out should be the fact that you should call the telemarketers and talk like a pirate next Friday as Mr. Barry suggests!
http://www.talklikeapirate.com/
Have you accepted Jesus as your Lord and Savior?
I thought the bible said "an eye for an eye"?
demon
-----
Nothing is ever a total loss; it can always serve as a bad example.
On their site, they list a new contact number:
(866) 500-4272
As others have pointed out, their old number has been disconnected.
--Quentin
Dave Barry has a good idea here - just as spammers get their details posted on the web and people sign them up for all sorts of unsolicited (e)mail, phone numbers of members of the American Teleservices Association should be made available so that they can experience the joys of unsolicited calls. Obviously, they won't be on the 'do not call' register, so it should be perfectly legal.
Actually, few passages in the Bible are as badly misunderstood as this one. The "eye for an eye" maxim is not about harshness; it's about proportional retribution.
Let me see if I can put it in context...
In ancient Palestine, offenses against one's honor were met with an escalating response. If someone stole one of your sheep, the manly thing to do was to go and kill five of his cows. If some careless bozo trampled a row of your corn with his ox-cart, you might go and set fire to his field. In other words, "teach 'em a lesson."
The eye-for-an-eye ethic put a lid on this escalating violence, insisting that punishment or restitution be proportional to the actual, demonstrable harm done, and that it not be determined by the rage of the party offended. For example, Leviticus 24:18 says, "And he that killeth a beast shall make it good; beast for beast." The eye-for-an-eye principle placed rational limits on retribution and punishment.
Unless they call you 25 times in one week after you tell them to stop like AT&T decided to do to us.
Carpe Canem - Seize the Dog
The autoanswering machine is auto-answering my call. Well, let's flood their tapes :)
Less is more !
If the numbers that the telemarketing industry is throwing about are even half right, this could end our current economic recovery. Telemarketers alledge that they create several billion dollars in sales every year, several billion dollars that will go up in smoke in October. That plus a huge boost in unemployed (and otherwise unemployable) persons is a very bad thing. Be careful what you wish for.
I'm quite happy with a tit for tat retaliation.
TFT has been proven a successful strategy too. I use it all the time and it's a very effective natural enforcement of the golden rule (original version, do unto others* etc), good training for the naive. The 'just take it' strategy only encourages the offensive behavior.
[ * that is to say, I DO 'do unto others', but if THEY 'cheat', then I cheat right back untill they 'get it', that cooperation is more profitable overall ]
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
and they have called all of us, so should we all cal them.
--from the b.b. king james bible fo the future.
It's pretty hard to screen your calls when they block caller ID.
no big sig
So, for every time a telemarketer calls, we are "allowed" to call back once. Publishing this phone number just allows us to extract this punishment.
:-)
Following your "logic", if telemarketers make 30 million calls a day (to individual people), they should expect to receive 30 million return calls. I think that should be sufficient to overwhelm their phonelines
demon
-----
Nothing is ever a total loss; it can always serve as a bad example.
It is too bad Slashdot doesn't have a -1, Shill moderation... I would use it on you.
I mean, to compare a grass-roots protest of an organizations business tactics to the senseless slaughter of thousands of civillians is the sort of logical leap that only a maniac (or a shill) could make. Dude, get a clue. Telemarketers are leeches on society. The list of people that telemarketing benefits is very short, and consumers are most definitely not on it. I get the feeling, though, that if I could check the payroll/stockholder's list of all the telemarketing firms everywhere that I would eventually stumble across your name.
The function of a telemarketer is to sell products at inflated prices to impulse buyers. If you ever find yourself listening to a telemarketer spiel and thinking "This sounds useful" hang up immediately, and Google for the same product. Odds are pretty good you will find something better, cheaper, or both without looking too hard.
That is the whole purpose of telemarketing: To push overpriced products onto people who are dumb/suggestible enough to buy something from a stranger who called them randomly on the phone. How do you know it isn't somebody playing a prank? Or collecting CC#'s for fraud purposes?
While I understand this doesn't mean ALL telemarketers are evil lawbreakers, I do know that all telemarketers are ANNOYING and are selling things that a careful shopper could get much more cheaply by doing a tiny amount of research.
Who did what now?
Since those guys have turneed off the 877 number here is updated contact info: Administrative Office: 3815 River Crossing Parkway, Suite 20 Indianapolis, IN 46240 Toll Free: (866)) 500-4272 info@ataconnect.org Legislative Office: 1666 K Street, NW, Suite 1200 Washington, DC 20006 Toll Free: (866) 500-4272 info@ataconnect.org give em a jingle.. i am
And their address is published at the bottom of their web site.
Perhaps they'd like some junk mail too.
American Teleservices Association
1666 K Street NW Suite 1200
Washington, DC 20006
877-779-3974
info@ataconnect.org
It's not o.k. to do the same wrong onto people which those people have done onto you.
Just because they annoy you, you can't harass them.
If it's illegal then leave the revenge to the goverment.
I mean otherwise it would be like shooting people who break into your home etc.
Owner of a Mensa membership card.
Following your "logic", if telemarketers make 30 million calls a day (to individual people), they should expect to receive 30 million return calls. I think that should be sufficient to overwhelm their phonelines :-)
Do you have any evidence whatsoever that this is the telemarketer who's called you? Even once?
Call the Chairman of the ATA at home!!!!!!!
Chairman:
Thomas Rocca, (770) 429-1956, 3840 Jiles Rd NW, Kennesaw, GA 30144
(provided by Google)
and they have called all of us, so should we all cal them.
--from the b.b. king james bible fo the future.
Do you have any evidence whatsoever that these are the telemarketers who've called you? Even once?
(and they're not the two you're thinking of, but I like the way you think) ...for the apologists for the poor telemarketing drones who will lose their jobs:
buggy whips
Go ahead - we'll tell you not to call, you'll say we're trampling your rights, but hey - you're obsolete.
Not to mention "your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins"
They're a bunch of double-standard-bearing tools who can't be any more creative about marketing than browbeating anyone they can find to shove home their apparently otherwise unsellable garbage.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Easy enough to do if you still have an old dialup modem hanging around, though, and the time to write a little script...
Do you have any evidence whatsoever that these are the telemarketers who've called you? Even once?
You want to mug somebody because you think they're in the habit of mugging others? I fail to see where you've established the moral high ground.
What's your phone number? Many of us wanna talk to you.
Less is more !
between the Slashdot effect and a DDOS attack. This looks like a willful attempt to crash their computer and drive their help around the bend; it's a DDOS.
They choose to call me, they choose to inconvenience me
Just make sure you establish that bit you're taking as a fact before you jump on board and dial the toll-free number like the rest of the slashbots. THINK before acting, man.
You're upset because you see Barry making a moral equivalence between the two, but he's talking only about the "right to a living" argument. He's not saying telemarketers are as bad as muggers -- or if he is, it's irrelevant to this particular argument -- only that their position is as untenable as a mugger's would be.
My only quibble is that the analogy would have been even better had he used, not mugging, but house burgulary. In both cases someone comes uninvited into your house -- even when you take steps to keep them out -- and take something precious (in the telemarketers' case, your time).
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
AT&T local service used to bombard me with three and four phone calls per day. I repeatedly informed them that I had DSL, and was thus ineligible, and asked to not be called again, and was told repeatedly that I'd be added to their do-not-call list, only to find myself getting more calls than before.
Here's how I solved the problem:
First, I called my long distance customer service number and informed them that I would cancel my long distance coverage unless they stopped calling. They told me that they couldn't help, and that I needed to call another number.
That number turned out to be the AT&T local service sales number. I tried to find out if they did their own calling or paid someone else to do it,but the guy wouldn't answer. The guy then began asking for lots of personal information. I finally asked why they needed that information to file a complaint, whereupon they said that this, too, was the wrong number to call. (What part of "I want to file a complaint" didn't the guy understand? How exactly did he get "I want your local service" from that?) Anyway, they gave me yet another number, but that the number was basically only open on weekdays,
I ignored the guy's warning about it being only open on weekdays, figuring that anybody who interpreted an "I'm not eligible, so stop calling me" complaint as an "I want to get your service" request was so clueless that he probably didn't know what was going on. Unsurprisingly, I was right.
So the number I ended up talking to was AT&T Local Services customer support. I had "the talk", as it is now infamously known, with the service rep, and he apologized profusely and agreed to put me on the do-not-call list.
To date, I have not received any more calls. I guess tying up AT&T's 1-800 numbers for almost two hours and threatening to drop my long distance service if they didn't stop harassing me was enough to convince them that maybe I really didn't want their local service....
That having been said, I think they're only excluded from the DNC law if they are your current long distance provider, so if they annoy you too much, tell them that from now on, "You're not dealing with AT&T" and see what they say. :-)
120 character sigs suck. Make it 250.
Here's a telemarketing situation where I'm just waiting for the payoff. Our office has several blocks of 100 numbers each, most of which aren't in use and are forwarded to the front desk (because a client may have an old number). Some months ago a mortgage company started autodialing our blocks. Our receptionist went from calm to frothing at the mouth in 60 seconds flat, and eveyone else was getting either a hangup call or a voicemail left for them.
I called the 800 number in the voicemail I personally received, got a manager on the line in record time (it helps if you sound like you want to confirm your satellite recon for the imminent airstrike) and explained that we had a block of numbers, that they were calling ALL of them and to please stop right-fucking-now. I then did the usual bit about do not call lists and a copy of the policy (which I never got). The do not call list was tough, since numbnuts didn't grok the "I have several hundred consecutive numbers" part very well.
The next day they did it again. I got another manager on the line, who was significantly less than understanding about the whole affair. In point of fact, he seemed dismissive of the whole fact that I had complained the day before and tha the was perhaps a bit offended that I was trying to interfere with his attempt to rescue a failing mortgage business. I reminded him about the FCC's $500 per call regulation and he got offended. Go figure. Apaprently the fact that the Federal government might put him out of business wasn't a factor in his worldview. I rang off.
And called the local police department and reported a couple hundred harassing phone calls. I leaned heavily on the second manager's attitude toward my request of the previous day and on his utter disregard for Federal codes covering his business. I named both managers in the complaint. These guys are less than fifty miles from us and in the same state, so it could happen.
We have a case number. Some day they'll screw up, and then a telemarketing manager will do the Perp Walk. I'll be sure to put whatever details I can on a website so we can all share the joy.
Veteran, Bermuda Triangle Expeditionary Force, 1992-1951
Looks like a job for Mailinator.
www.mailinator.com
The number for the ATA is meant for those who have inquiries/ concerns regarding the ATA, right? It's not a personal phone number- it's a number that you call if you need to talk to the organization. Well, if I disagree with what that organization is doing, and I'd like to let them know about it, well, then I think I have a right to call.
;-)
Of course, it doesn't give me a right to flame them over the phone. In following with Christian principles I would politely state my beef and be done with it.
It is stinkin' ironic, though, that they're now complaining of being called too much.
Insightful: 76, Off-Topic: 379, Flamebait: 24, Funny: 152, Interesting: 201, Underrated: 55, Troll: 9, Total: 896
for ($n=200000; $n < 900000; ++$n) { };
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Man, reading Matthew 5.38-42 makes me really glad I don't live my life according to the bible.
If I get smote on the right cheek, I'm not gonna offer up the other - I'm gonna smote right back, plus enough extra to make sure I never get smited by that guy again. If a guy sues me and wins a judgement, I'm definitely NOT going to offer to double it. I'm not sure what "go with him twain" means, but I'd surely resent anyone trying to compel me to go anywhere. And if I gave to him that asketh, the beggars in Toronto would clean out my bank account before I got to my office!
Are you 100% certain that's the correct "Thomas Rocca"? I'm not the only one with my name in my city, and while "Rocca" may not be terribly common, "Thomas" certainly is.
Would it surprise you too much if the real Thomas Rocca had an unlisted number, and this is just some poor guy who happens to share his name with a scumbag?
Please don't call this guy unless you can be more sure you're not hurting an innocent.
What does it mean to have 2 million telemarketers out of work? Well, if those 2 million people are not putting in their 40 hours a week, then they won't be taking up a total of 40 hours of time each week from a few hundred other people. Imagine what might happen with 80,000,000 more hours of time become available to other people at work, at home, and at the dinner table. Imagine the increased productivity happening at work. Imagine the opportunity to get the home and garden chores done. Imagine being able to actually talk and bond with your family at dinner time. Oh the horror!
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
I had to threaten to sue them for harrassment thier last 3 calls. I don't even know how many times we asked to speak to a manager. They told us that it takes 30 days for you to be put on their do not call list after you tell them, but they were calling us up to 3 times a day. Hard to believe that someone that WANTS your service would treat you that way. Just, amazing.
Carpe Canem - Seize the Dog
Ok, where is it! I want my do not spam list. My rights are being violated 400 times a day. :-)
It is not illegal. I wish it was, and nobody would have to do this.
"There is no teacher but the enemy."-Mazer Rackham
Doesn't the average PC with a "voice modem" have the capability to become an autodialer these days?
Hey! Salshdot gets more effective every day! The number has been disconnected.
/. effect!
Hurray for the
You're not old until regret takes the place of your dreams.
I work for the IT department of a small, rural hospital near New Orleans. Which means people call me about problems with everything from their PC to their fax machine. It may not be part of my job description, but I'll try to help them with their problem if I can...
One day a couple of weeks ago, I had a very frustrated message on my voice mail from the director of our Radiology department. It seems that the phone in one of the diagnostic imaging rooms would ring, and when someone would pick it up it was a recorded message from a telemarketing company.
If it had happened once, she probably would have wrote it off to a mistake. Instead, it kept calling the number. Continuously. For a half hour, by the time she'd left me that message. Now, as you can imagine, having the telephone in a MEDICAL PROCEDURE AREA continuously ringing is a bad thing. Not to mention that line now being tied up so that in an emergency the techs can't call for help.
I ran (literally) down to the department, picked up the phone the next time it rang, and recorded the call. After about two minutes, a real human picked up the line.
Said human began reading her script when I asked her if she knew what phone number this was. I then told her that at that moment, I was standing in an x-ray room, in a hospital, with a patient who was supposed to be getting tested right now but because we kept having to pick up the EMERGENCY PHONE they were just kind of lying there moaning (at which point the director standing next to me made the most pitiful moaning noises, heh, heh) and we would like to GET HER OFF THE TABLE IF YOU PEOPLE HAD NO OBJECTIONS...
There was a moment of silence, then prolific appologies, a promise to stop the calls, more appologies...After leaving her flopping on the end of the hook for a moment, I accepted her appology, took her name and number, then hung up.
The phone never rang again.
There's just over a year to go before the 2004 presidential election, and everybody in the nation is extremely excited. Except of course the public. The public, shrewdly, pays no attention to presidential politics until all of the peripheral dorks have been weeded out, and it's finally time to make a selection between the two main dorks left over.
So what does the public care about right now? Telemarketers. The public hates them. It hates them even more than it hates France, low-flow toilets or ''customer service.''
We know this because recently the Federal Trade Commission, implementing the most popular federal concept since the Elvis stamp, created the National Do Not Call Registry. The way it works is, if you are a member of that select group of people (defined as ''people with phones'') who do not wish to receive unsolicited calls from telemarketers, you can go to www.donotcall.gov and register your phone number. Starting Oct. 1, any telemarketer who calls you will be locked in a tiny room with a large, insatiable man who will force the telemarketer, repeatedly, at all hours of the day and night, to change his long-distance provider.
No, sorry, that was the original concept. But the law is pretty strict: For each call to a registered number, telemarketers face an $11,000 fine. This program is a huge hit with the public. Already 30 million American households have registered; this figure would be even higher if it included all the Florida residents who tried to register but accidentally voted for Patrick Buchanan instead.
And how has the telemarketing industry responded to this tidal wave of public hostility? It has issued this statement: ''Gosh, if these people really don't want us to call them, then there's no point in our calling them! We'd only be making them hate us more, and that's just plain stupid! We'll try to come up with a less offensive way to do business.''
No, wait, that's what the telemarketers would say in Bizarro World, where everything is backward, and Superman is bad, and telemarketers contain human DNA. Here on Earth, the telemarketers are claiming they have a constitutional right to call people who do not want to be called. They base this claim on Article VX, Section iii, row 5, seat 2, of the U.S. Constitution, which states: ''If anybody ever invents the telephone, Congress shall pass no law prohibiting salespeople from using it to interrupt dinner.''
Leading the charge for the telemarketing industry is the American Teleservices Association (suggested motto: 'Some Day, We Will Get a Dictionary and Look Up 'Services' ''). This group argues that, if its members are prohibited from calling people who do not want to be called, then two million telemarketers will lose their jobs. Of course, you could use pretty much the same reasoning to argue that laws against mugging cause unemployment among muggers. But that would be unfair. Muggers rarely intrude into your home.
So what's the answer? Is there a constitutional way that we telephone customers can have our peace, without inconveniencing the people whose livelihoods depend on keeping their legal right to inconvenience us? Maybe we could pay the telemarketing industry not to call us, kind of like paying ''protection money'' to organized crime. Or maybe we could actually hire organized crime to explain our position to telemarketing-industry executives, who would then be given a fair opportunity to respond, while the cement was hardening.
I'm just thinking out loud here. I'm sure you have a better idea for how we can resolve our differences with the telemarketing industry. If you do, call me. No, wait, I have a better idea: Call the American Teleservices Association, toll-free, at 1-877-779-3974, and tell them what you think. I'm sure they'd love to hear your constitutionally protected views! Be sure to wipe your mouthpiece afterward.
In closing, here's an:
IMPORTANT REMINDER -- Mark your calendar with a big ''X'' on Sept. 19, which is the second annual National Talk Like A Pi
Telemarketers alledge that they create several billion dollars in sales every year, several billion dollars that will go up in smoke in October.
Yeah, and the Russians said that they had several thousand nukes pointed at the US in the Cold War, well, technically they did.
Many, many, many of the silos had water in them up to the missile in the bottom, thus, when launching, would have killed all of the people launching them and left a missile with a nuke on top in burning in a hole in the ground and thirty minutes of rocket fuel burning there with it.
Lighting those suckers would have caused ecological disaster for the USSR.
The lesson here?
Never, ever, ever, trust the information given to you by your enemies. Do you expect North Korea to tell you the truth when threatening you? Expect enemy information to be overinflated. Or downright bogus.
I expect we'll reach 70 or 80 comments before someone thinks to post the home phone numbers of various telemarketing company's CEOs (hint, hint, c'mon, someone out there has those suckers, post em!).
Too late.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
I recently had a problem with an autodialler - I'm in the UK, so I don't know if these are illegal here or not. But I do know they are bloody annoying, especially when they call every five minutes for about an hour each evening. No message, just an immediate hang-up. Since they were withholding their number, I couldn't even call them up to yell at them. And that's saying nothing about all the other junk calls I was getting - double glazing, conservatories, loans, mortgages, the lot.
Eventually I complained to my phone company (NTL), who told me about a little-known service they offer - blocking any calls that have withheld their number. Free service, takes a couple of days to activate, and can be switched on or off with a keypad code.
Not one unsolicited call since. Brilliant.
You must think in Russian.
It's pretty hard to screen your calls when they block caller ID.
Depends - how many of your friends block caller id when calling you?
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
Dave Barry is a columnist syndicated from by the Miami Herald.
What I think is hillarious is I receive calls from Sun-Sentinel all the time trying to convince me to buy the rag they print. Sun-Sentinel is Herald's main competitor in South Florida. I'm sure Herald must do the same thing but I've never received calls from them.
No but if they choose to support the idea that such harassment of myself is constitutionally protected, I could care less if I'm a direct victim of their phone attacks.
It's a bit underhanded, I know, and some people might actually LIKE getting called by telemarketers - but it struck me that it would be rather easy to automate adding every phone number listed in the United States to the DNC registry.
:D
Write a script that hits the page, enters in 3 phone numbers, waits for the mail to be sent to an address it generates on the fly, 'clicks' the link, rinse, repeat.
No telemarketing!
Ok, Bad Idea. I should remember where I'm writing this. Someone is likely to go off and do it.
I have some junk I was going to sell on eBay. Why not call him up and see if he wants to buy it first?
In fact, why don't we all do it?
I mean, that's exactly what telemarketers do, so they can hardly complain if we do it to them, can they?
So don't call and be abusive. Don't call and argue. No, call and try to sell him stuff.
"Hey, Mr Rocca, I was wondering if you need a new 17" computer monitor..."
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Actually, I think the moral argument is pretty good too. As discussed above, telemarketers make money by selling people things they wouldn't otherwise buy, using high pressure tactics and abusing people's goodwill.
I don't see a hell of a lot of moral difference between gently mugging granny for $50, and pressure-selling her $3000 of windows she doesn't want or need.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Come on man, it's called a 486 and a war dialer.
Now that I think about it, I bet I pissed a lot of people off in the early 90s. It's the middle of dinner and the phone rings "Oh damn a telemarketer" except when they pick up the phone they're greeted by my ever-so-desperate-for-love 486sx.
-----
jonathan barket
Are you a lawyer or what? Just because everyone else is afraid of being held liable doesn't mean they CAN be held liable.
- Get a Caller ID Box. Your telco probably will charge you a fee for sending the information, since as they see it, you might decide not to answer the phone based on who is calling and therefore they will not earn the connection charge on the call.
- Block Withheld Numbers if you live in a jurisdiction where withholding your number is still legal. Your telco probably will charge you for this, but it's worth it. {before I had mine blocked, I used to say to Number Withheld: "Are you a paedophile? Because your number is withheld." That saw them off. On my mobile, where there is no such service available, I have to resort to doing an impression of a recorded announcement: "Anonymous calls are not welcome on this line. If your business is important you may ring back without withholding your number. Goodbye."
- Don't say anything if you don't recognise the caller's number. This spins them out, because they think it could be an answering machine. A legitimate caller will ask for you by name. A sleazeball telemarketer will just hang up.
- Ask them how they got your number. This distracts them from the purpose of the call and maybe gets them into an infinite loop.
- If all else fails, remember that it is your line, and you are under no obligation to be polite with unwanted callers. Any obligation of politeness would fall on the originator, not the recipient.
I think the best solution would be for the do-not-call list to be in the phone directory, by placing a symbol next to the numbers of people who did not wish to receive unsolictited sales calls. I'm not so anti-social that I'd consider going ex-directory, because that would jeopardise things for people who might have a legitimate reason to call me {and because I like looking up my name in the new phone book every 18 months or so, it gives me a kick without harming anyone else}. Having the "do not call" list in the phone book itself would be almost foolproof. Everyone with a phone line gets the phone book, so there would be no shortage of witnesses to the fact that your number was on the list. The only downside is that you might have to wait till the new directory was published in order to get your name properly DNC'd. But the telemarketing companies could be made to subscribe to an update list as a condition of their operating licence.Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Guys, telemarketing can be a lot of fun if you add some positive atmosphere to it. Just think of it, since the chances of meeting your friend on the other end of the line are pretty slim, you can get away with almost anything: dirty jokes, humiliation, etc. Whenever a telemarketer calls me, especially if the person has a thick foreign (Indian, most of the time) accent, I have fun. Here is how to do it:
:)
a. Pretend to be somebody else, like an old person with a hearing problem or a recent immigrant who speaks poor English. Make the telemarketer re-read the offer and ask stupid questions: start with product related stuff and then move onto personal issues. For example, in the middle of conversation say "Wow, you know, you have a really sexy voice!" Works like a charm
b. If you have roommates, set up a plot. I remember when my roommate pretended to be an abusive husband and I played a role of a wife for unwanted calls. Whenever a telemarketer called us, we would be 'in the middle of a physical conflict.' "The husband" would swear at his wife and beat her (just slap your naked leg for the sound effect); the wife on the other turn would say things like "Stop beating me! I've had enough already" and then she would continue to talk about her personal problems to the telemarketer in between the beatings. Basically, use your imagination; most of the time the other party will hang up.
c. Put them on hold. This is by far the easiest one, unless you're expecting some other call. When you receive an unwanted call, tell them that you're in the middle of something that you must finish asap; therefore, offer them to stay on the line for a minute or so. Then go read a newspaper, drink a cup of tea. This may sound stupid, but this brings positive results: you keep telemarketers from calling other people through your personal sacrifice.
There is more stuff and it usually depends on who is calling and when. Sometimes when I have a bad day, I find telemarketers to be my stress relievers: I bitch and swear at them for several minutes. After hanging up I start feeling better right away.
Well, originally it was a lot like VOIP, but all done in hardware...
You can shoot people who break into your home. It's called self defense. You have an obligation to protect yourself and your family and if you feel your life is in danger and you have no other choice you have a right to kill.
In most states you just have to make sure they're dead. Otherwise you could be sued for their injuries thanks to our retarded legal system. It also eliminates "he said she said" and as a result makes it very difficult to form a case against you should the family attempt to do so.
"Just because they annoy you, you can't harass them."
If calling up and complaining about what a bunch of idiots they are is "harassment" then I guess I can. It doesn't matter what loose retarded meaning the "poor little victim" gives to "harassment," it's perfectly legal to call up and complain to a business about anything related to their company.
"It's not o.k. to do the same wrong onto people which those people have done onto you."
If it's not illegal it is. Maybe you have a moral problem with feeding people their own medicine but here in the real world, there are times when morality isn't an issue.
Unless you find that complaining about a "service" is morally wrong.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
So, just because someone is a telemarketer it's up to me to see if they are indeed the specific telemarketer calling me? How?
The blanked out phone number on my caller ID?
The meandering response when asked flatly who they are?
The unresponsiveness when asked to not call?
The repeated phone calls for the same types of 'services'?
Now, even if one telemarketer did put me on their do not call list, should I spend time and effort to track that one and all the others, only to have them say "Sorry" if they are caught later?
Before you respond...yes, I've been using the legal phrase. Due to telemarketers, I haven't used my answering machine in months because of the number of messages they are starting to leave. My answering machine says call my cell or email me. When I get home, I delete the messages without listening.
Telemarketers and muggers -- if I'm harmed by one, why be nice to the others? Just because they didn't personally target me this time?
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
Hmmm. Millions of people lost jobs since Bush took office, 93,000 more payroll jobs vanished last month, and consumer confidence just took another dive.
Telemarketers and the Bush administration are not good sources of unbiased information. And, in other news, a fortune is not waiting for you in some Nigerian bank.
Making trouble today for a better tomorrow...
you've been trolled. Sorry, dude, better luck next time. I hope the karma is enough to make up for it.
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
Darl McBride, posting to slashdot? Why even bother trying to respond.
When did slashdot cause you to lose your sense of humor and, more importantly common (troll) sense?
^_^
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
Just look at his name.
:-)
Christ you people have gotten so gullable.
And the parent article is a humor piece... no intelligent discussion allowed!!!
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
"eye for an eye" is just what it says. What illiterate people can't grasp is that it was one of the hundreds of laws giving to the legal system of the OT. The laws were never given for the common man to enforce.
If someone poked your eye out you went to the judge and if the person was found guilty, their eye was ordered out BY THE COURT. Just like we do today.
Just because I can go in any law library and read up on laws and punishments doesn't mean I get to go around enforcing the law and punishing people as stated by the law.
Not this obvious explaination will stop you from spouting your ignorance.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
How anyone could consider your post as anything other than an attempt to attract flames (i.e. the very definition of flamebait) is beyond me. Agree with the guy or disagree on the MERITS of the comment. But if all you got is that religion has warped his brain, well frankly, that's flamebait and it should be moderated as such.
For sure. Replying keeps the Postal Services busy.
If you have two reply envelopes, swap the contents or include some local flyers maybe along with a nice note - "Here, have some of mine".
Once I was a four stone apology. Now I am two separate gorillas.
"Greetings, friends. Do you wish to look as happy as me? Well, you've got the power inside you right now. So use it and send one dollar to Happy Dude, 742 Evergreen Terrace, Springfield. Don't delay. Eternal happiness is just a dollar away."
Which, after a court order, will be changed to:
"Hello, this is Homer Simpson, AKA Happy Dude. The court has ordered me to call every person in town to apologize for my telemarketing scam. I'm sorry. If you can find it in your heart to forgive me, send one dollar to: Sad Dude, 742 Evergreen Terrace, Springfield. You have the power." -Homer
Would it work to post something like a software license where it says 'by opening this cd you agree to the terms and conditions...' on your door? have it say... 'by knocking on this door you agree that you aren't selling anything, aren't trying to 'save' me from my evil ways, yadda yadda yadda.'
even if it wasn't a legally binding thing, i think it'd be hilarious to come to the door after a salesperson knocks and say, 'did you read the eula?' and make them feel stupid as you point out section a paragraph b line g.
And say stuff like, "Man, how do you do this? If I had that much hatred coming down the phone at me every day, I'd slit my wrists within a week." or "Have you considered a slightly less dirty profession, like prostitution or drug dealing?" or "I'd like to tell you about my personal savior... and yours, tell me friend, have you heard the world of Jesus Christ?" Of course, I haven't got a call from a telemarketer since I had Qwest add the unidentified call blocking feature to my line. Sure it costs me a few bucks a month, but the time I was spending coming up with Jesus speeches more than makes up for it.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
You know, the first amendment doesn't guarantee you an audience...
I'd far rather call those assholes at home, just around dinner time. I think I could make much more of a point about my objections to some asshole invading my private time to sell me shit if I could talk to one of the guys in charge, not some head whose job it is to answer an 800 number, and I'm quite willing to foot the costs of doing so.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Seems as good a word as any.
Have you forgotten that this is Slashdot?
We have geeks here who can cobble together a dialing machine from an old 2400bps modem and a telephone handset.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
You're right - it could've been the vicious beatings by his strict Catholic school marm that warped his mind.
Some people are just SO insensitive...
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
Once again our "fine" republic is in debt to this great visionary and his tireless production of columns with many correctly spelled words. I have used his free tax advice every year and it was worth every penny. I hope that my fellow slashdot readers will support him in his presidential run because
a) His name can be rearranged to spell "V-Bra Ready" and
b) That would be an excellent name for a rock band.
Once this kicks in and starts working, it's time to add E-mail to the do-not-call system. It can happen; the political pressure is there. It's opt-out, but it's global, government-enforced opt-out. If it works for phones, it can work for mail.
What needs to be clogged is the sales lines. You have to find a sales line that is connected to the buisness in someway. If not sales than the CEO's @work and @home telephone numbers are good too. I despise spam on all levels.
I would really love to see a website dedicated to this as I can't stand spam. Just a list of numbers to call and email addresses to spam. This site should be directed at telemarketters AND spammers.
You heard it here first:
When the do not call list takes effect, I predict the reincarnation of the door to door salesman.
(Besides, haven't you always wanted to know what that telemarketer type person on the other end of the line looks like?)
-Sean
You can send them an email stating your point of view.
NOTE: A well reasoned, polite email will probably have a greater effect than an angry rant (if it has any effect at all).
True enough. Think of it then as push-side restraining order of the kind granted to provide relief from the psycho ex-significant other. Nothing illegal about an ex making a call, except if they're calling you. It's a list to provide relief from harrassment.
I saw one of those 'dial-up modems' on eBay once but it was, like, $3500. What were they used for, anyway?
Marxist evolution is just N generations away!
But the big telemarketers don't open up phonebooks and start dialing.. They buy lists from other companies, many of which you probably have "prior business relationships" with.
Actually when using a calling card, caller ID is often blocked. For whatever reason, a couple of my friends were using calling cards.
no big sig
So we create a non profit for the purpose of protecting the "privacy of the individual against intrusive marketers" and call to our heart's content.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
Have you ever been to the donotcall website? It just asks for the phone # and then sends a 'click-to-confirm' email. How hard would it be to write a script to submit all possible phone numbers?
Marxist evolution is just N generations away!
Is there something wrong with just hanging up on telemarketers? I can detect the sales pitch within seconds of it beginning, and most of them use call machines that make the connection, then pass it to a telemarketer - takes a couple seconds, and if you hear the silence, then the click of the transfer, you just hang up because you know it's a bullshit telemarketer.
Done deal!
They won't be able to overcome that flaw. It'll hurt productivity...imagine having the telemarketer dialing the phone manually. Not happening.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
It's unfortunate that something, such as telemarketing and spam has to get as bad as it does before we as a society can get together to voice our discontent with the situation. Even though telemarketing and spam are exceptionally annoying they are by far minor infractions against our personal freedoms compared to what we endure silently because we have not had one leader step forward to rally us against injustices that plague us every day.
Telemarketing is a shit job that pays fairly well with no real skills required. The only reason it pays so well is that it has to to get folks in the door in the first place. So the worse we are to the individual telemarketers the harder it is for the telemarketing companies to find employees, The more the telemarketers must be paid. So flame on and make it hurt baby
I used to have a cool sig, back when I cared
1. Be a telephone company
2. Profit
3. Telemarketers make mass calls
4. People get upset and make mass calls back at telemarketers
5. Telephone company $$$Profits!!! even more...
Now if I could only get to step 1
The other day I got a call from a telemarketer who wanted me to change my phone service (for the low, low monthly price of $49.90/month). For some reason I felt compassion for this bloke who called, and I didn't tell him to go fuck himself outright (although it would have been well within my right, since my ass-cheeks had just landed on the toilet seat, and I was ready to unload.) Anyway, so I was nice, and feigned interest, and asked if they had DSL, and yada yada yada. And then asked all the questions that they're supposed to be legally bound to answer (their name, company's name, address, phone number, etc). Around this time, the guy starts to get annoyed, since it's been almost 60 seconds that we've been talking. He gives me his name and address, when I (honestly) realize I don't have a pen, so I ask him to hold on a second. Ten seconds later, I've got a pen and paper, and I copy down his name as well as the company's. When I ask for the address and his employee ID number, he gets all snotty, and taunts me with, "What are you going to do, come up here and arrest me? I'm in Vancouver." I explain, still politely, that he is the one that called me, and that as I understand the law, he is required to give me certain, specific information about himself and his company. When I start to ask for his address again, he get's all pissy, and abruptly hangs up.
Now, normally, I'd say fuck it, and go on with my day, but he taunted me with that "what are you going to do" attitude, so I say fuck him. A few googles for his company (RSVP Customer Care Centre) later, I find the website (after getting arond their silly spelling of "center"), and the name of his boss, the VP of Sales and Marketing. She was very kind and apologetic, and she seemed honestly surprised by Joe's reaction to me on the line; for four year he had been a model employee. And for Joe, fair enough, his job probably does suck with people giving him shit all the time; still, at the same time, there's a certain amount of professionalism that I expect from these guys. Maybe he was just rude because he knew he'd be out of a job when the DNC list goes into effect.
Anyway, my (elusive) point, call their bosses and bitch, especially if they're rude or unprofessional.
My girlfreinds parents bock all of the withheld numbers. Unfortuanly that also includes all phone numbers that the local telco doesn't have a name attached to it, So our old line in the tiny little town I used to live in could not successfully call her parents on the other side of the country. We moved to a larger town and no longer have this problem, but remeber some of these plans have side effects
I used to have a cool sig, back when I cared
Will someone tell me why those 2 million telemarketers who will lose their jobs MAKING CALLS cannot find a job, instead, ANSWERING the F(*$)#@)* customer service line ?
ATA officials have said about 2 million of the 6.5 million people working at telemarketing call centers across the nation will lose their jobs because of the rules that established the nationwide "Do Not Call" list.
so 5% of the USA's 140 million labor force work as telemarketers? Why did the journalist let them get away with those numbers?
I have a few. They are used for :
Identifying who is old (remembers using them) and who is young.
Identifying who is really old (can identify connection speed by listening to it connect.)
Holding down papers in a stack.
Keeping books on the shelf from falling over.
The blinkenlights are pretty in a dark room.
Soliciting complaints from a spouse who thinks they need to be thrown away.
Cursing new PC manufacturers for not putting serial ports on new computers.
and less commonly : connecting to another computer at an unGodly slow speed, making it faster to travel across country by Greyhound bus to pick up three DVD's worth of data than to actually transmit them across that data connection.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
I'd love to tell them to add me to their do-not-call list (which they are required to honor, by law.) Problem is, the assholes are using automated dialers and pre-recorded messages, so I have to wait until their 2min spiel is over before I have a chance to quickly copy down a 800 number. And they're doing this several times a week. AND these damn pieces of phone spam are clogging up my voicemail!
What causes more economic instability? Getting a bank of automated machines turned off (no live people in the phone spam I'm getting), or disrupting the work of a professional programmer working on medical image analysis software?
I used to get tons of those too. I'm in New Jersey and my local phone provider is Verizon, and I signed up for their Call Intercept service as soon as it was announced (for an extra monthly fee; it's included in some plans). Any incoming call with anonymous or "Unavailable" caller ID gets answered by a Verizon computer, which (1) plays a recording that says the caller must press 1 to continue; then (2) requires the caller to record their name; and then, if the caller successfully does all that, (3) rings my phone with a distinctive ring (three short rings, in my case). If I pick up the phone, the computer says there's a Call Intercept call and please press 1 to hear who it's from. If I do that, it plays the caller's recording. If I want to speak with the caller, I press 1 again and it connects me. If I don't, I just hang up.
As soon as I activated Call Intercept, the house went eerily silent. No more telemarketing calls. Period.
No, wait...I actually had one person (a real estate agent) go through the rigamarole. One telemarketing call in about two years.
I've just poked around the do-not-call web site and found that as of September 2, they registry has grown to 48 million phone numbers. They got a significant boost in numbers over Labor Day weekend -- when Dave Barry printed his article. About half of the 6 million new entries registered by phone. I had been wondering just how many people out there have not registered simply because they haven't heard about this registry yet.
The web site also mentioned that a large number of people have not completed the registration process by replying to the email that is sent when they register online. (Certainly none of the readers of Slashdot fall into this category.)
Does anyone know approximately how many residential phone numbers total are in use in the U.S.?
Oh, and please mod parent back down, mm'kay?
AT&T local service used to bombard me with three and four phone calls per day.
I used to have the same problem, and also put a lot of effort into trying to make them stop. I switched phone companies, and intentionally went without cable TV and fast internet (both AT&T-only in my old building) for a year as a direct result.
Their telephone harassment was particularly egregious. I've been AT&T-free for three years, and plan to continue to be.
If I walked down the street and cornered people and asked them to give me money, would that be illegal? Especially if I essentially ignored their refusals and became rude, aggressive and demanding?
I'd wager that at minimum they'd bust you for agressive panhandling, perhaps someone might even stretch it into a form of mugging or robbery.
And this is exactly what telemarketers do. On the street, the more aggressive and strong-willed people would walk away or otherwise rebuke them and walk away, but I'd bet that the same people who are bullied into buying from telemarketers would fork over money to someone just demanding it on the street.
What amazes me is why the media doesn't spend more time and effort exposing this "sales technique" for what it is. Surprisingly most articles on DNC lists focus on the "irritation" of the calls, or worse, the untold damage to be done to our economy through the loss of telemarketing jobs. None of them seem to focus on the decepetion, bullying and probably outright fraud associated with telemarketing.
In my mind is inextricably linked to the same business ethos that fueled Enron, WorldCom and host of other "lying your way to wealth" business models that seem to have prospered.
That's the category where telemarketers really cross the line into coercion. There a lot of elderly people or people with alzheimers that are in good enough shape to still be in their own homes, but they really don't have the ability to deal with coercive people on the phone.
I know one woman who changed her long distance service 5 times in a month... and they would NOT stop calling her, despite the requests and then orders from her family. She's nice, pleasant, and didn't have the ability to say no. That's the sort of person who this list is really for, and I for one applaud it.
~ Leilah
about something like that... some guy named Bloodninja trying to get a girl to talk like a pirate.
Apart from being pretty twisted, it was hilarious... I don't recall the details, other than the fact that she kept having to say "HAAARRRRR!"
Maybe Bloodninja is Dave Barry's online alter-ego...
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
Soliciting complaints from a spouse who thinks they need to be thrown away.
And when the spouse complaints get too much that old 2400 modem can be sacrificed. "What, you mean I should throw out any more of my stuff" (that probablydoesn't work and wouldn't be used even if it did) "I already threw out a perfectly good modem to clear some space, do you have any idea how much those are worth" (or rather were worth when they were new and actually worked).
A true nerd doesn't even throw away malfunctioning equipment since it can come in handy to have something you can part with to appease that significant other
- We are the slashdot. Resistance is futile. Prepare to be moderated -
There are a lot of people living on their own, with phones so they can call/be called by their families, but who do not have the ability to deal with telemarketing calls in a sane/sensible way. I'm not talking about people being jerks, I'm talking about people who mentally are not capable of handling someone trying to coerce them into something over the phone.
I'm sure there are "legitimate" telemarketers out there, but the general tactics are just appalling.
For more information on telemarketing fraud and the elderly, check out AARP's site - Telemarketing Fraud Underreported, and their Off the Hook Study.
~ Leilah
The callee speaks very quietly, to try and get the telemarketer to raise the volume of their phone/earpiece. After a few seconds, the callee blows an air horn right into the phone, blasting the telemarketer.
Ever have that happen?
STOP MISUSING APOSTROPHES, YOU MORONS!!!
Put up a "No Soliciting" sign. If anyone comes up to your door and tries to sell you something, have them arrested for trespassing.
STOP MISUSING APOSTROPHES, YOU MORONS!!!
I wish. I still get "your official long distance notification" calls at least once a month in Arizona. I believe that's pushing mortgages.
These very blatantly aren't the telemarketers who've called anyone. This is the telemarketing association that claims to have a constitutional right to call anyone they darn well please. What is being said is that if they do... then so does everyone else.
Ok, now read this sentence: "Of course, you could use pretty much the same reasoning to argue that laws against mugging cause unemployment among muggers..." Where do get the line about wanting to mug people?
~ Leilah
It seems that everyone in his right mind despises telemarketing. Spam too. Ask anyone, and they'll tell you that there are few things they hate more in life. It seems as if there are no exceptions to this rule -- everyone, bar none, hates telemarketing and spam.
But it can't be true. Someone must be responding to this stuff by spending their money. Because for some reason, telemarketers and spammers stay in business. Somehow, it must be worth it for them.
If everyone hated the stuff as much as they say they do, if everyone hung up on the unwanted calls and deleted the unwanted mails in nothing flat, like they say they do, then the problem would fizzle out before long. No one could make money doing it, so there would be no reason to keep trying. And yet, the crap just goes on and on and on.
I've read rumors that a certain small percentage of the people called or mailed actually do respond and end up buying something; usually the figure is put about 10%, or something similarly low. Hard to believe that such a business would be worthwhile if the response rate is so low; but whatever it is, it must be high enough that the incentive for telemarketing and spamming is maintained. Otherwise, there'd be no such thing.
A national no-call list is a nice idea, but I can't see the problem going away altogether as long as the telemarketers and spammer still believe there's a chance to make money. Certainly the spammers are not going to let some trivial thing like a Federal law stop them. (They'll just go on spamming from Antarctica, or wherever.) If we really want the problem solved, once and for all, we have to ensure that there is no future for those businesses, and that would require educating the public, right down to the last man, woman and child, to always follow this rule without exception: If someone calls you or emails you to sell you a product, then whatever you do, don't buy that product!
Always keep a sapphire in your mind
See his post above.
Great. Now they know what it is like to have to change their number after being harrased over the telephone.
Maybe now they have to tell all their friends to let it ring twice, hand up and call again or something like that.
... can this be applied to?
1) RIAA
2) SBA
3) Al Qaeda (no published number, just start calling every phone in Pakistan)
4) The Office of Homeland Defense
5) Democratic National Committee
5) Republican National Committee
Sadly, once the Evil has grown beyond a certain critical mass, mere mass protests have no effect.
"The new phone book's here! The new phone book's here!
(I'm not insinuating that the original poster is a Jerk)
One time, I received a call from a marketing firm hired by my bank (so yes, there was a prior business relationship) asking about the AOL disc they sent me. They wanted to know if I remembered receiving it, what I thought of the service, etc. (Obviously the disc didn't make it anywhere near my CD drive.)
So when she asked me what I ended up doing with the disc, I told her the truth: "I cut it up and added it to my AOL CD moasic collection." She was caught off guard by that one, but repeated it word for word as she entered it into the DB.
Even today, the thing is pasted up artistically on the front of my wardrobe. I would have liked to see the marketing manager's reaction when they came across that entry.
If followed, would also promote both kinds of Spam, the virtual, and the pulp-and-paper kind.
See if you can follow this one:
I have a physical mailing address, therefore, because anyone can send a letter/flyer/wad-o-coupons to that address as "Occupant", that they have the "right" to do so.
I have an E-mail address, therefore, because (apparently) anyone can send an e-mail to just about anyone at a given ISP's client list using any form of SpamBot, or mass-e-mailing program that uses common, uncommon, or even downright ludicrus usernames before the "@" on any given ISP address, they have the Right to bombard my inbox.
Ain't logic just grand?
Don't you wish that there was a Law requiring any E-mail/Snail-mail/Phone Call to have a verified "Reply-To" field/visible Caller ID, so you could send THEM a Solicited responce to their message/offer/"opportunity of a lifetime"? After all, They contacted You in the first place, so you have the Right to contact them at your convienience and give them appropriate feedback, right?
Right?
Who's with me? *Arrr!*
~X!0
Stop saying that!
Shouldn't there be a way to automate this somehow? I'd love to use one of the old P2's to call up a bank of 800 and local numbers that have dialed me electronically and "spammed" me.
Is this possible and is it legal?
The first computer I used with a modem was a TRS-80 model 1. The modem was 300 baud and didn't have a tone generator -- once I had it off the hook, I had to call a set of delay loops that would click the connection on and off the required number of pulses for each digit. I wrote my own address book to keep track of the various BBSes I would call.
And yes, I did consider writing a script to automatically dial blocks of numbers in series to find other BBSes that I might not know about. It wasn't difficult; just seven registers and a handler to determine whether a connection would be valid or not, and I would've had it there. It should not technically be more difficult now to do something similar. Legally, absolutely, and rightly so, but if one weren't to be bothered by such trivialities like the law, technically it's not that hard, even today.
Oh, and that old wardialer I'd conceived of? I never did run it, because I figured that even one hang-up call might be considered annoying. Years later, it turns out that I'd be right. Moreover, it turns out that I then knew more than many people working in the telemarketing industry know now.
You cannot truly appreciate Dilbert until you read it in the original Klingon.
Who cares if they didn't call you or inconvenience you... there still a telemarketer and many others like them have harrased you time and time again...you have a right to call them and complain about there harrassing phone calls to the general public/your discust with their method of marketing. (You have a right to call them... in the US or Canada.) My $0.01 :P
No, this is
About 5 times a week I get calls like this when I pick up the phone there is a series of beeps, one every few seconds, and of course no human on the other end. Is this just a war dialer? It doesn't make modem noises; just beeps....
C'mon mods. AC notwithstanding, this deserves +5 funny.
HH
--
Only slightly harder than it will be for telemarketers to ignore the do not call list.
When telemarketers call, I wait for the first pause and then tell them -- in a really bored voice like I'm reading from a script -- "I am obligated to inform you that because of this unsolicited call, your company will be listed on SLIMEYMARKETERS.COM . You have 30 days to appeal this decision or the listing will become final; see site for details."
If they ask for clarification, I simply repeat the "statement" (hoping I remember it exactly), and say that's all the information I'm required to give.
Very satisfying, particularly if I ask to speak to a manager -- sends them into a real frenzy about 30% of the time (especially when they can't find the site in order to appeal, since I always make sure it's bogus).
Don't insult arms dealers like that.
> Have you ever been to the donotcall website? It just asks for the phone # and then sends a 'click-to-confirm' email. How hard would it be to write a script to submit all possible phone numbers?
Don't do that! Some telemarketing scumbag would point it out, and argue for the whole list to be thrown out-- on the grounds that you could no longer tell which numbers on the list were entered by individuals, and which ones were fed in by automated scripts.
If you were an idiot.
Economic growth does not occur because people are paid. It occurs because more stuff is produced.
Telemarketers do not produce anything - people pay for telemarketing because it either lets them steal customers from their competition, or get people to buy things they don't really need.
Thus, eliminating 2 million telemarketing jobs will *HELP* the economy, as the money that was going to pay them can be instead used on something that will actually promote economic growth, like investing in more efficient production, or just psssing the money you're saving by not doing telemarketing on to the consumer in the form of lower prices, so they can buy more stuff (thus promoting growth).
paintball
If they inconvenience me one iota, I couldn't care less in the slightest if every last person there lost their job.
You know what else is an inconvenience? When the cops stop me from stealing cars. Someone needs to put a stop to that, and I couldn't care less if every one of those damn, dirty cops lost their jobs, because they're inconveniencing me.
The point being that just because you're inconvenienced doesn't mean jack. The cops are right to arrest criminals and the telemarketers are right to use the phone service they pay for.
They choose to call me, they choose to inconvenience me
You agrees to allow them to call you when you subscribed to a service, the phone service, that explicitly allowed incoming calls from anyone. If you don't want incoming calls from anyone, then you need to find a better phone service. But don't take it out on the telemarketers that they're using the system you subscribe to as per the agreements everyone made.
What if these were ignorant asshats sending 50 million spam messages a day? Would shutting them down be bad because its going to put some people out of work?
No, it would be bad because they paid for their internet access just like everyone else, and so they have the same right to use it as per their agreement with their ISP. If they break that agreement or steal internet access, that's something different entirely and has nothing to do with the spam, but so long as they are completely following their agreement they should be left alone.
If you make the decision to accept email or phone calls from strangers don't complain when you get some. Take some personal responsibility.
Not if all the e-mail addresses used were on the same domain -then the gov't could easily delete those entries.
I wasn't suggesting anything, just pointing out the odd system. I suppose it's a privacy thing.
Marxist evolution is just N generations away!
They've had the number Dave Berry published disconnected, but here is the current contact information from their website (including toll-free numbers):
Legislative Office:
1666 K Street, NW, Suite 1200
Washington, DC 20006
Toll Free: (866) 500-4272
info@ataconnect.org
Administrative Office:
3815 River Crossing Parkway, Suite 20
Indianapolis, IN 46240
Toll Free: (866)) 500-4272
info@ataconnect.org
The old one (877-779-3974) seems to be disconnected.
The new numbers at:
http://www.ataconnect.org/contact.htm
Legislative Office:
1666 K Street, NW, Suite 1200
Washington, DC 20006
Toll Free: (866) 500-4272
info@ataconnect.org
Administrative Office:
3815 River Crossing Parkway, Suite 20
Indianapolis, IN 46240
Toll Free: (866)) 500-4272
info@ataconnect.org
It uses the popular formmail.pl script and it's poorly configured. View the source to the page and save it to your hard drive. Then edit the code where the tag starts.
First, modify the action value to include the fully qualified path to the formmail.pl script as such:Then, remove the following lines: Save your changes and open up the page that's saved on your hard drive. Now you can put whatever the hell you want in the form and it actually gets sent. If you want, you can also change the address it gets sent to by changing the following line in the code:(Note: manually modify the code rather than copying and pasting, because Slashdot's anti-troll space-adding would cause it not to work.)
......Of course, this is all just FYI type blathering in the spirit of open source hacking and I do not advocate anybody writing a script to exploit this poor design.
I put my phone number on both the Massachusetts and Federal DNC lists, and since then I've gotten exactly one unwanted call (okay, besides the ones from my senile grandmother):
.
Me: "Hello?"
Him: "Yes, you indicated your interest about in July, and provided this phone number. Are you still interested?"
Me: "Uh, no."
Him: "Oh, sorry. Thank you for your time."
I was quite confused about this for the rest of the day. But it was the politest telemarketer I'd ever met.
My other favorite was the salesperson who called me my first week of college, and asked if I had a visa or mastercard. When I answered no, she asked if I had any sort of credit card at all. After I said no, she said "Uhm... thanks" and hung up.
Something like a big jackboot mounted on a pedestal, for kicking the telemarketer's asses...
Oh well, what the hell...
I seem to recall something about not even the king may enter one's home without being invited to enter. Last I heard, I could walk away from speech that I found offensive. By signing up for DNC that's what I'm doing, walking away. I've been on the Pa. DNC for over a year. One night I got a prerecorded sales call. I'm champing at the bit for them to mention their company name or an 800 number I could call so I could write it down and complain on the state DNC web site to get them fined. neither was given, and at the end, it told me to give my name and phone number if I was interested. They got to call me, and got me to listen to their whole message without giving any information to me that could get them fined. It was a recorded message, and my guess is they got my number from the DNC list. The anger I felt at the end of that call was enormous. I hate those people more than ever, and now I really owe them one. Also, I got a call from Comcast with an offer. As I already get cable from them, they are allowed to call me under Pa. rules. The only thing is, Comcast contracts this out to a telemarketing company. The telemarketing company must have the DNC list, yet they felt compelled to call me in Comcast's name anyway. The next telemarketer that messes with me? It won't be pretty.
This group argues that, if its members are prohibited from calling people who do not want to be called, then two million telemarketers will lose their jobs. Of course, you could use pretty much the same reasoning to argue that laws against mugging cause unemployment among muggers. But that would be unfair. Muggers rarely intrude into your home.
If muggers intrude into your home, aren't they not merely muggers but burglars now?
No TiVo and no caffeine make me something something...
I'd be happy to not only mug a mugger, but to beat him senseless and leave him bleeding in a ditch to die. Is this just a joking troll, or could anyone be so stupid as to
1) Take the side of violent terrorizing criminals (muggers)
2)Take the side of harrassing mean spirited companies that harrass good citizens in their homes
3)believe that legal methods to hinder the efforts of an organization devoted to harrassing people in their homes for cash and to betraying the public of the USA is comparable to an illegal act of violence? (Not that anyone except a mugger would care if you went around kicking muggers in the head and taking their stolen money so that they couldnt buy guns and drugs with it).
Obviously, if you just thought someone was a mugger, you shouldn't mug them, but if someone attempts to mug me with a knife, and I happen to have a gun for some reason, and I don't really want to deal with the police...I have no moral qualms about demanding his wallet. Hell, I'd probably demand every single item of clothing just for fun. Leave him there naked in an alley to reconsider his choice of job.
Hey, for all I know, he has other people's wallets on him, and I can return those.
If he has a problem with this, he can go to the police and complain that I mugged him while he was trying to mug me. Of course, he'd be immediately fingered by four other victims who were reporting their mugging to the police, so they probably wouldn't believe him.
I probably wouldn't do this, because it's technically illegal, and he'd be a lot worse off in jail than he would be if I just took his wallet. But I don't have any moral issues with it.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Those people I can have arrested for tresspassing. Our condo grounds has multiple clearly posted signs. I'll just call the cops while they are busy harassing other residents.
Okay, I just thought I'd point out something... I am a telemarketer, as that's what I do. I do the actual calling. However, I most certainly AM in favor of the national do not call list. I think it's great. It (usually) isn't the actual telemarketers who are against it, it's the people who are higher up - the actual companies that stand to lose contacts (in their eyes, potential profits), that care.
Personally, I can't see why more people haven't signed up for do not call lists, especially when they pick up the line on the 8th attempt and they complain that we keep calling. Although lately there are more and more people that I get each day that are catching on and requesting us to put them on our do not call list, so that's good.
Don't forget that if you are on a do not call list for a company or a call centre, and they call again, you can sue for $500 a pop. And once the national do not call list takes effect (assuming it is legislated) in October, you can sue for $11K.
Then perhaps I should be looking for another way to make a living? Just a thought boys and girls, but the "think about the poor XYZ" arguement can be used by almost anything. Yes, somebody is going to lose out on this.
Personally, I'd rather pick up garbage or hand out cheeseburgers than do telemarketing, at least those are a public server. And yes, with the abuse you probably taking by pissing off people on a daily basis, plunging those clogged-up toilets might even be a better living as well. Gee, imagine that, looking for jobs that, while less sophisticated, are less offensive to the general public.
A telemarketer hung up on *you*? Do you by any chance live in Soviet Russia?
Or alternately, they might actually make enough money to get out telemarketing when they sue the living crap out of the person who does this. I seem to recall hearing (pun not intended) about such a case, can't find an actual link to it though.
Yeah, they might come over to your house and break all your plywood! Of couse, you'd have to lend them the use of your stereo so they could play their "Mortal Combat" remix while they did it.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Oh, Pshaw! I expect we'll reach 70 or 80 comments before someone thinks to post the home phone numbers of various telemarketing company's CEOs (hint, hint, c'mon, someone out there has those suckers, post em!).
I'd almost be more interested in having these numbers just to find out if they're on the national DNC registry....
www.wavefront-av.com
AFAIK, I've never seen this argument used as a legal basis to end TM: the simple premise that my telephone service is a paid, private service. Commercial solicitation over a private service I pay for should not be legal. I've never heard of a class action suit against TM's on this principle.
I expect some degree of spam and advertising from web-based mail like yahoo- I don't pay for my Yahoo mail account. But if I *did* upgrade to the paid premium level- then I expect not to receive unsolicited emails (if I never posted my email address to any forum, newsgroup or website) nor see any advertising anywhere on the web client.
Similarly, my paid private voice service shouldn't be a conduit for unsolicited commercial interests.
The only legal way TM makes sense is if I choose to appear on a "Commercial Solicitation OK" list. Then, I need to be compensated for every phone ring by a commercial interest calling me- whether I answer or not! TM's are abusing my time in distraction and using a paid resource in my home- the phone ringer and the single phone line, which another personal contact may be trying to use to reach me during the TM's attempt to call. The remuneration from each TM call ought to appear as a credit on my phone statement- again, only if I volunteer to be on a "OK to call" list.
Telemarketing has *nothing* to do with freedom of speech, or the rights of commercial interests in any way shape or form. It is about exploiting (current) holes in the interpretation of personal privacy rights and abusing private communication services.
Another post in this thread mentioned placing an indicator in current phone books next to personal name listings, a flag that means "no solicitors". Why this hasn't been available yet is dumb-founding, as it is no different than the ability to put a "NO Solicitors" sign on your front door (of your physical home).
But a recent report indicated about half of the US telemarketing CEOs have put their numbers on the federal government Do Not Call list.
;-)
Well then, since the fDNC includes exemptions for charities, political campaigns, and companies you have (however indirectly) some business relationship...
I guess we'll have to call to harass them for contributions to the "down with telemarketing" fund. Or to vote for the AntiDirectMarketing candidate in 2004.
300 : sounds like static, no actual tones.
1200 : static followed by a single tone for about two seconds.
2400 : static followed by the same tone you heard at 1200, after about a second the pitch of that tone gets higher and lasts about a second.
There are no 4800 or 7200 connections under the most commonly used (that I am aware of) protocols, with the exception of a few off-color fax machine emulations.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
Answer it like it's a secret agent "Thank you for your quick response 004, MI6 will be pleased by your efforts for Queen and Country. Your first objective is to contact your liaison, tomorrow night, 1930 GMT, at [insert place here, make it some place weird like Jakarta, Indonesia.] You will receive your instructions there." *hang up*
Any sales guy will tell you that.
If the customer walks out of the store with exactly what he wanted when he came in, you have sold him nothing.
Duh
I bragged about my Karma at a job interview but I didn't get the job.
A headhunter was especially obnoxious so my husband just said 'Go to hell' and hung up on her. A few minutes later she called back and yelled "I just wanted to hang up on YOU!" and slammed the phone down.
Not a real effective sales technique...
I signed up for the do-not-call list. It needed email confirmation before being considered valid. I didn't know until the respond period had expired. Why? It sat in my bulk mail folder because YAHOO thought it was a piece of spam.
Stay sentient. Don't drink bad milk.
To hell with Karma, I'm saying it anyway!
/.
The Telemarketers insist that they have a constitutionally protected right to harass us
I am sorry but you are fully incorrect. They are not claiming that. They are correctly pointing out that they have a right to try to sell you something. You have a right to hang up, refuse the call, talk their ear off and not buy, or actually buy something.
Commercial speech *is* a form of speech. With freedom comes responsibility. Good is accompanied by the bad. Just as freedom of speech means you can/will be exposed to ideas you disagree with, so to doe si tmean you will be exposed to sales methods you disagree with.
This mass calling, while superficially petulant, demonstrates that a right to call and harass people works both ways, if they want to play that game.
Now you're getting somewhere. Mind you, to take this further means that if they want to spread *your* contact information to *their* friends and they all decide top start expressing their opinions (since they are not soliciting, the list and all solicitation laws are irrelevant), then you can not argue with it and remain consistent.
If this company chose to list Dave Barry's contact info on their boards and urge all the TM companies to call and give him their opinion. that's fine too.
That's a product of freedom, like it or not. Once you start limiting another's freedoms, yours are next on the chopping block. Hey,w e start with Do Not Call lists, then they respond with "Do Not Call Lists" and next hing you know it is *you* on the receiving end of that Do Not Call violation. Or, you start getting nailed for posting people's private numbers on
Hey, I now, rather than take personal responsibility, how about we just eliminate *all* advertising and marketing! After all, maybe I feel "harassed" by all those tampon commercials on the TV, the Radio, the billboards, the newspaper, etc..
Mark these words:
If this continues, and you are not on a Do Not Call list, then legally it will be determined that you are effectively on a Do Call List.
"Well, you aren't on the Do Not Call List."
Laws like this have an odd tendency to "legitimize" the activity.
Further, the list excludes charities and non-profits. Congratulations, now every charity or non-profit on the world can get a list of people to call. All you do is shift it to a different group of tele-spammers. If the theory that people most likely to list themselves are the kind least likely to sy no, you have hamred these people even more. Now they have their heart strings tugged for "non-commercial" causes.
Besdies, it is soo easy to set up a non-profit that sells things and gives much of the proceeds to charity. Watch for this to become more commonplace as DNC lists are more prevalent.
In fact, I'd argue this system will increase the tele-spam. It will (in one theory) increase the sales per telemarketer, thus makign it more profitable to be one. This will lead to more of them.
However, Telemarketer-tarpitting(TM) has precisely the opposite effect. In reality it costs the company little to be on the phone with you; that is part of the calculation.
However, since most TM persons are paid based on performance, or stick around/kept on based on performance, then there is a higher rate of turnover in the TM labor market. This higher turnover leads to higher training costs and lower productivity. This is a more profound impact on revenue than simply calling them or keeping them on the phone longer incuring toll charges.
My Suburban burns less gasoline than your Prius.
Man people are really eager to list "insightful" today, eh? What happened to earning such a rating?
Begging for money is not the same as trying to sell you something. If fraud is involved, prosecute the fraud! Don't be a wimp and prosecute over a stupid and petty thing as calling you; it is not any different than "Mommy, Billy is looking at me!!"
Now, stand on the street and try to *sell* something, then you can start to get close. Just because you don't like TM, and probably can't say no yourself (with or w/o a civil tone), is no reason to be so incipidly wrong.
Why do I suggest you may not be able to tell them no? People that can/do typically do not complain about the suppposed "strong arm tactics" or compare TM to a mugging. They usually complain about the time and interruption.
The worst thing to happen to this country was the abdication of personal responsibility.
Don't like the show? Change the channel. Don't like the TM, hang up, don't take the call, or say "no".
Hell, maybe gather some friends together, pool your money and run an ad campaign "Just say no to telemarketers." Just be careful to not use the phone to do it, or you lose your message.
Like it or not, most TMers are college students putting themselves through school or second working parents, or single moms. Why? It pays better for one. This is not a "felel sorry for them" plea, far from it. However, it flies in the face of the pathetic claims that TMers are evil people out to bilk the poor and elderly from their life savings. It makes people feel better about yelling or cursing the other end of the phone out. People use it to justify something they know is wrong.
You'd rather put these people out of a job than focus on nailing those who *are* committing the atrocities you mention. Mr Pot, meet Mr. Kettle.
--rant on--
But hey, for some people they have to believe that shakey voice on the other end of the phone is a guy with horns a red suit and sitting in a room filled with brimstone, because they can't stand the cognitive dissonance that more governemnt means those people have to resort to telemarketing jobs, as opposed to staying home (if a working married mother), or giving up the TM as the second job they need to cover their living expenses or get out of debt because the government taxes the shit out of them to pay for all these "there outta be a law!" shouts from people who will not stand up and take personal responsibility.
--rant off--
My Suburban burns less gasoline than your Prius.