Obnoxious phone calls

[jhetley]

I swear I am tempted to vote _against_ the last campaign to call me with a canned message. Or maybe the one with the highest call count. And they are offensive calls, almost totally negative. (When I listen long enough to rate the content, that is. Should leave the phone hanging, to tie up their damned lines....)

If the Bush and Kerry camps were individuals, I'd be able to get a court order against them for harassment. Don't know about other areas, but we are averaging several calls a day, a royal PITA.

How to win friends and influence people. NOT!

Comments

[anisoptera.livejournal.com]

You must be getting all my calls. No one has called me about anything election related at all.

[starcat-jewel.livejournal.com]

Seconded. Of course, we are on the Do Not Call List and we have a TeleZapper, which may be getting some of them. Also, they won't usually leave an answering-machine message, so the solution may be to monitor calls for a few weeks.

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

The "Do Not Call List" doesn't apply to political crap. You don't think the Congress would have allowed _that_, do you?

We don't have an answering machine on the home line, just the business line. And _all_ these calls have been coming on the home line.

[starcat-jewel.livejournal.com]

Answering machines are relatively cheap. How much is your peace of mind worth?

I don't give a shit about "exemptions". If we get a call from someone selling something or looking for money, they get FLAMED -- political, charity, "prior business relationship", or whatever. "Do not call" means exactly that -- DO NOT CALL HERE, I don't care who the f**k you think you are. Oddly enough, we've gotten very few repeat calls... ;-)

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

You can't flame a recorded message. Just doesn't seem to have any effect.

We have a spare answering machine, but took it off the line because it ended up getting filled with crap all the time. Amazing how much organic fertilizer you can fit through those tiny wires.

[kinzel.livejournal.com]

We have answering machines on all available phone lines -- except the one that has the auto answer fax/modem. I have had a couple sneak through... but they generally don't want to turn me over to their supervisor. Since one of our is officially a business phone I usually insist on a supervisor and they usually hang up on me.

[rolanni.livejournal.com]

I think I've picked up exactly one recorded call, which I promptly hung up on. Not nearly as satisfying as hanging up on a Live Person, but you take what you can get.

Usually, I just let the machine answer the kitchen phone (since the people most likely to call the kitchen phone don't want us, anyway -- our number's one digit off from KMart), and if it's somebody I actually want to talk to, I'll pick up.

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

Must be a factor of Life in the Big City. Even the phone company can't find beautiful East Winslow?

[kinzel.livejournal.com]

Uhhh....
well during the ice storm of a few years back it turned out that phone company and CMP had misplaced a pole ... and that wrong pole number had them assuming us about 4 miles from here, on another road entire (you know how it is in Maine -- there are six roads claiming at one point or another to be "The Waterville Road" and off several of those roads are roads calling themselves Albion Rd... not to mention several roads calling themselves Quaker Hill Rd... so that it's possible to have a location at the intersection of Quaker Hill Rd and Quaker Hill Rd, a half-mile east from the Albion Rd, just before the west turnoff to Albion Rd....)

We *think* they know where we are now, since they had a guy out here with GPS equipment walking pole to pole on our road not long ago.

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I know how Maine roads are. Does your road at least have the same name on each end? At least three of them around here don't....