I'm sick of getting calls from random people and businesses/charities.

[kane_magus]

Aside from my sister, who is the only person who consistently calls me on my home phone and not my cell, it's always either a wrong number, someone conducting a survey, or someone asking for money.

I think I'm going to start doing what I probably should have been doing all along: letting the answering machine screen my calls rather than just blindly picking it up every time it rings when I'm here. That, and I think I'll also see about having my name and number removed from the phone book as well.

Comments

[alessar.livejournal.com]

Aren't you on the national "do not call" list? It really helped me a lot with telemarketers. I used to get a message DAILY talking about a "free cruise" I won. Finally I called the # one time and left a 'put me on your do not call list' message. Two days later, the calls resumed, same script, different actress, different travel agency. The national list ended all that.

Of course, that doesn't stop some charities and surveys but... it did help some.

[kane-magus.livejournal.com]

Oh I'm definitely on the do not call list. But that doesn't stop charities, as you said. Tonight's call was from the Washington State Firefighter's Association. I made the apparent mistake of actually giving them $12 the last time they called me only a few months ago, so now I'll probably never hear the end of them. Although this time, the connection strangely died as I was responding to the lady's question about how I was doing this fine evening. I'm sure she just assumed that I'd hung up on her, which I'll admit I was considering doing as soon as I realized it wasn't someone I immediately recognized. But this was one of the few times that I didn't hang up in the midst of being endlessly harrassed after telling someone I wasn't interested. I didn't even get that far this time before the line went dead of its own accord. Weird that.

Anyway, the do not call list also doesn't stop businesses with whom you have a "pre-existing relationship". For example, I order pizza from pizzahut.com fairly often. A few months ago, I received a call from someone claiming to represent Pizza Hut who was conducting a survey about various things like the quality of the pizza, the quality of the service of the delivery person, and so on and so forth. I've also gotten three separate calls concerning an Amazon.com credit card for which I applied in order to get a $30 discount on this year's school books, trying to tell me about all these amazing new services I don't want or need. Things like that.

And it doesn't stop the crackpots who are too stoned to dial the correct number (http://www.livejournal.com/users/kane_magus/5641.html). Or the multitude of people who have called me looking for some guy who has the same name as me and who apparently owns a housing complex somewhere in this area. Or the woman from some collection agency calling me looking for some guy who has the same name as me and who apparently works for Lincoln Motors and who apparently didn't pay for some body work done in April of 2005 on a 1994 Nissan Maxima. That last one really threw me off for a bit before I finally realized that she wasn't talking about me, considering that I did drive my sister's 1984 Nissan Maxima stationwagon at one time, although it was totalled in a wreck a few years ago.