On 30 Sep 2003 19:53:16 -0700, (Isidor
Gunsberg) wrote:

Bruce: Somehow, my news service didn't include your reply to my post,
so I'm replying indirectly to you through Isidor's.

Yes, there are all kinds of hoops though which we can jump, all kinds
of ways we can inconvenience ourselves, to save the telemarketer the
hassle of looking at a do-not-call list.

You jump through hoops all of the time for almost every other aspect of
your life as well, but if you want to rant at t-marketers feel free. If
they're the greatest of your worries, you're in pretty good shape.

You might say you're blessed to have hemorrhoids instead of rectal
cancer, but they're both a pain in the ass.

One of the cheapest and easiest ways is the caller ID.

Caller ID costs about 5 bucks a month, and is often offered only as
part of a more expensive package. Why should an individual buy this,
if that individual has no other use for it?

Is this a serious question? $5.00 a month? Wow. Stop the presses,
$5.00 a month, how outrageous. Let's see I could stop most
telemarketing calls bothering my family for $5.00 a month, or I could
get the government to prosecute and fine all telemarketers calling me
for billions a year. Which is the better deal?

Your five bucks won't stop 'em. Caller ID only solves on small part
of the puzzle, as Isidor points out, below:

It wouldn't cost anything close to "billions a year".
And you can do the math: if 50,000,000 eventually want to get put on a
Do Not Call list, and they have to pay $60/year, that also works out
to Billions of dollars a year, just to "stop" "most" telemarketing
calls with Caller ID.

Of course, Caller ID only gives you the information on whether to
answer the call: you still have your phone ring.

Interestingly, almost ALL telemarketers block Caller ID
information, rather than identify the name of the company, and the
number from where they are calling.

So you're jumping through hoops on *every* phone call, peering at the
caller-id, waiting until the caller starts leaving a message before
picking up the phone. Incidentally, doesn't this constrain the type
of answering machine you can use? Maybe not every family wants to
leave a speaker phone on all the time. Maybe some people prefer to
use the central office answering facility, in which case, you'd have
to retrieve the call when it was done and maybe return it on *your*
nickel if was important.

Not at all. I'm not so anal, that I have to answer a ringing phone
just to see if it's an annoying telemarketer.

Telemarketers count on you thinking it's somebody other than them.
How many times do they leave a message?

If you never got any calls that required immediate attention, you
could just shut your ringer off and review your messages every few
hours (I used to do that at work, BTW). Maybe your daughter's car has
broken down and she's calling from a pay phone with her only quarter.
Maybe it's some other kind of emergency. There's lots of valid
reasons other than anal curiosity why you might want to answer that
phone.

Because of time constraints, telemarketers and market researchers rely
upon the "McDonalds, drive thru" behavior of most Americans in the 21st
century. The corporate "secret" is that the phone is almost always
answered by the 5th ring if someone is home. Therefore most
telemarketing companies set their dialing systems to ring no more than 5
times before moving on to the next "customer". Time is money even for
telemarketers.

Wrong! There's no cost to them at all. The marketeer isn't just
sitting there waiting for you to answer. Most telemarketers use
predictive dialers. These machines dial several numbers concurrently
and pass control to the marketeer only when the phone is answered (or
some set number of rings have occurred).

Telemarketers
are paid by the hour. They aren't sitting waiting for you to answer
your phone after it's rung 5 times. Whether they're dialing three
numbers or 100 numbers at once, they aren't letting yours ring for more
than 3-5 times I can guarantee you, unless they're dialing manually.

It's all based on statistics. The companies adjust their predictive
dialing software to maximize the time the marketeer is actually
selling rather than waiting on the phone. I'm sure there's some
incremental cost to, e.g., dialing 10 numbers rather than 6, but not
much compared to the labor. If people start waiting to answer their
phone, they'll bump the number of calls.

It sounds to me that you've conditioned yourself to be a phone slave,
which is why you and other Americans like you continually get ****ed off
at telemarketers. If you're sitting at your desk and picking up the
phone on the first ring, no wonder you want the government to protect
you from telemarketers.

No, I don't do that. I have a telezapper and I've set my phone to
pick up on the second ring. The speaker phone is connected to the
answering machine, and by now, most people who regularly call me know
I screen my calls, so they identify themselves and I pick up. Those
that don't know me usually leave a message if the call is for an
"honest" reason. I think I've gotten maybe two telemarketing messages
left on the machine in the last six months.

I haven't had a telemarketing problem for the last couple of years. I
get maybe three or four what I believe to be TM (i.e., hangup) calls a
week. Before I started doing this, I was getting between fifteen and
twenty calls a *day*. It was a major irritation.

But these mooches, besides costing me time and money to "manage" their
calls, have constrained the way I utilize equipment for which I've
paid. And I don't like it.

Good luck by the way.

With forty or fifty million people ****ed off enough at the
telemarketeers to take the time to get on the do-not-call registry,
the solution's not gonna involve much luck. We've got a steamroller
going, and no politician is going to stand in front of it. It's gonna
stop, even if it takes a constitutional amendment clarifying and
constraining the rights of commercial speech (which is not as absolute
as you might think, as Nike found out recently).

Is it because a ringing phone is annoying? Is it because you can't
continue reading your paper or writing your document or whatever until
it's finished ringing?

Is it because you have conditioned yourself to be a slave to a ringing
phone? Ask yourself why if you don't want to be disturbed by a ringing
phone you don't read your paper in a room where there is no phone, or
why you don't turn off the phone until your paper reading is done?

Again, assuming that I have no valid personal reasons for wanting to
receive calls when I'm doing other activities. Maybe I work 3rd shift
and sleep during the day, but expect personal calls important enough
to be awakened for. The right of telemarketers to mooch off equipment
for which I've paid supersedes my right to use that equipment as I see
fit ?

So your view is that the government must make your phone management
skills more efficient and that anything you, yourself might do to
prevent you from being harrassed by unwanted phone calls is jumping
through hoops.

Jumping through hoops seems like the best term for it.

Why do the telemarketing calls stop after 9 PM and not start up until
some time in the morning? You think it's because the telemarketers
are nice considerate guys or the vast majority of phone users have the
improved "phone management skills" you talk about? Hell, no. It's
the good old government, gonna kick their butts for me if they break
the rules. And there *will* be new rules, and some companies who
can't live by 'em going out of business.