Can I Speak To...

I don't know about you, but we get around twenty of these calls a day, every day except Sunday. That works out to approximately six thousand a year or so of illegal and annoying phone calls.

Now, we are on a do not call list, which may be the single biggest farce in US government history, and that is saying something. These companies could not care less about some stupid list as their only job is to try to find one sucker in ten that will stupidly take them up on their illegal offer.

It must be working because they have thousands of people working for them and they clearly are making money hand over fist or they would be doing something else, like bank robbery. Instead they have call banks set up around the world, mostly in third world countries, where they can pay the staff thirty nine cents a day to bother you and me.

My favorite is when an obviously subcontinent Indian national asks for me by mispronouncing my name as he, or she, introduces themselves as Fred or Carol. Right. I'm positive that is their real name because you run into Fred's and Carol's daily that are from Pakistan or India.

I also love it that they start calling us at five in the morning and continue on until around seven at night. Apparently they learned to pronounce English but never learned how to tell time. If you are like us, those five in the morning calls that jolt you awake bring only two things to mind. Someone died, or someone needs a last minute fourth for their six fifteen tee time.

The good people at the FTC who are less busy protecting consumers and more busy trying to keep their jobs have no chance of stopping this nonsense. They have basically thrown up their hands and said call all you want we can't and won't stop you. There is an ebb and flow to the calls. More around the sign up period for Medicare and fewer in the middle of summer.

Much like me, these people can't be insulted no matter what I say to them. I have called them some of the worst things you can think of. I have threatened their families with grave harm. I have asked for sexual favors. None of what I say is even acknowledged or interrupts their prescripted patter. They would make top rate carnival barkers if they chose to change careers.

Usually our caller ID will say Spam Call and we just go and block it without answering but they've become better at annoying us by stealing the names of actual people so it looks like maybe we should answer it in case it is a doctors office calling for something.

Apparently they even stole my name. I discovered when I call my mother from our landline she doesn't answer it because it says Spam Call instead of my name. I called my provider and they said that due to multiple complaints from others that my number was robo calling them, the phone company had no choice but to stop publishing my name. I had to send them a letter asking to be reinstated so my mom no longer has an excuse for not taking my calls. Or at least she now needs a new one.

I usually find these calls annoying and rarely answer them, however, if I have nothing going on I enjoy answering them and playing games with the caller. Sometimes I pretend to be a detective investigating the murder of myself and ask them how they know me and what their relationship to the victim is.

Other times I pretend to be very interested in whatever they are trying to scam me and will keep them engaged for several minutes until I just hang up in the middle of asking a question like the call was accidently cut off. And one of my favorite things to do is just keep saying, hello, hello, hello until they hang up themselves.

There has to be a way to eliminate these and once we have a government in place that is really interested in protecting the consumer, instead of getting even with one clowns perceived enemies, we may figure out how to get this to stop once and for all.