[...]
> A better way to deal with telemarketers is to pick up the phone and when
> they ask for Mr/Ms so and so tell them "hold on", put the receiver on
> the table next to the phone and go about your business. This will
> certainly hurt them more by wasting their time than blocking their
> calls. If many people did that, it would sufficiently tie up the
> telemarketer resources, which may eventually decrease the frequency of
> their calls for everyone. Not to mention the fact that it does not let
> the phone company profit from selling you a service to protect you from
> telemarketers with whom they are in cahoots.
I suggest not doing anything to annoy or irritate or inconvenience the one making the call, since it is already crap work with equally crappy pay. An ex did it for a while, and she was kept in a hot humid warehouse with few breaks making the calls, and was given shit from not only many of the people she had to talk to on the phone, but the managers who demanded they keep people on the phone despite the abusive language and lack of interest in what they were selling. She came home crying many evenings.
I used to be a Jackass and rant at the telemarketers. Then I got Caller-ID, and never had to talk to them, but they still called and left long empty messages on my machine and filled up my Caller-ID list (mostly as Unknown Name/Number, different than an anonymized call). About a year ago I added the DTMF tones indicating no service (the bee-boo-boop that you hear when dialing a number not in service) to the front end of my answering machine message. As long as you start talking right after the tones any human dialing the phone will know that the number works, but the auto-dialers telemarketers use will remove your number from their listings.
The "zapper" advertised on TV does the same thing, but they charge $50 or something absurd. And I think they only emit the first of the three tones, and telemarketers are getting smart to this and not deleting numbers unless they receive all three tones. [The three tones were used to indicate no service so that other combinations of multiple tones could be used for other indicators. However the first tone hasn't been used in any other combination so some auto-dialers would treat a number as being not in service upon hearing just the first tone.]
You can download the tones from a few websites if you google for them, or I can mail a wav file of them to anyone interested. I get absolutely no telemarketing calls any more.
Matt
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