So I get a call today. I’ve just moved into this apartment and I get calls A LOT from either telemarketers or people thinking I’m someone else (which often are telemarketers in disguise). I haven’t gotten around to registering with the do not call list so I don’t get too angry at the people calling me. But today…argh…Phone rings, I answer it.
Me: Hello?
Paberboy: Yes…this is Mike your Oregonian delivery person…(talking with a REALLY creepy voice)
Me: I don’t get the paper.
PB: Ahh well you just moved into my delivery route, right?
Me: Uhh I have no idea. I don’t read the paper, I don’t want the paper.
PB: Ok then I’ll leave you a free copy.
Me: What? No I don’t want… click
He hung up on me! The @#$^ jerk hung up on me when I was telling him I didn’t want it! I wanted to just scream I was so mad. Why the hell would he waste a good paper on someone who obviously doesn’t want it?? I have a good mind to call the paper’s main office and complain about him. =_= I’m signing up for the no call list right now. Even though I’ve heard it’s effectiveness is hit and miss.
I recommend the National Do Not Call Registry
It has worked well for me. Fast, free, they only want the phone # to block and and an email to send for verification link.
The only problems I’ve had is in the law itself, which exempts a lot of charities and political pitches, plus businesses. I have my work number forwarded to my cell, so this comes up.
Don’t be too upset with Mike. His telephone manners may not be the best, but odds are he’s been told to do that sort of thing by his circulation manager at the paper, for just the reason given: cold calling by a neighborhood kid and then a free paper (or a week of free papers, sometimes) results in a new subscriber enough of the time to make it very worthwhile for the men in circulation to make their paper boys do it.
Yeah well he wasn’t a kid. He was as old as I am by the sounds of it. He just sounded REALLY creepy (like heavy breathing ‘what are you wearing’ creepy) and I get really really angry at being hung up on.
So call the Oregonian and tell the circulation manager that you don’t want any solicitations and you don’t want any free papers delivered. If you’re so moved, tell her Mike hung up on you. Or maybe an adult who delivers morning newspapers has that job because he’s not great with people, and let that part go.
He just maybe a kid hitting puberty a bit early at the age of eight yah know.
I don’t know how good the federal list is, because Wisconsin has a stronger one, and it works great. Now if we can pass one for charities and one for political messages. A person should have the right to say I don’t want those types of messages too.
Just remember that released sex offenders still have to work to eat. They can only get jobs like paper delivery where the pay is crappy and nobody has to interact with them. You don’t need a resume for that job, just a car.
This practice kind of makes me angry. The free newspaper in town refuses to hire anyone under the age of 21, and they have to have an insurable vehicle that is no more than 8 years old. I don’t see the point of not allowing some 13 year old the chance to earn a few dollars. The charge newspaper is almost as bad. They require any delivery person to be 18+.
Every once in a while I find a paper in my driveway. I throw it out. Sometimes I’ll get it for a few days in a row, then I have to call and remind them to stop littering my driveway. It usually stops for about half a year, then I go through the cycle again.
Around here, there are “motor routes” for which you need a car (or a lot of patience and a bike) and foot routes, which mostly go to thirteen year olds. Nice balance, I suppose.
For a long time, most cities had afternoon papers, which were customarily delivered to subscribers by the paper boy. The paper boy was a boy, of approximately Boy Scout years, who would pick up his papers after school and deliver his route. Only if you were rural were you on a motor route, delivered by men in vehicles. (And, of course, if you preferred you could get the paper downtown.)
Over the last fifty years there has been a shift to the morning paper, which was always common in the largest cities but rare in average towns. Afternoon papers tended to merge with morning papers, lose circulation and close down, or switch to morning publication.
While some papers successfully established distribution by kids before school, the institution of the paper boy gradually but inexorably declined.
However, Aunt Flow, if you term someone a “paper boy” without reference to age in your OP, you cannot blame people (me, at least) for assuming you meant a sub-adult male newspaper delivery person, not an obscene-call-making adult. “Boy” to me has a referent of “male individual too young to vote in other than school elections.”
When I was about 14, I was a paperboy for about two months, during winter, in Illinois. You would have to trudge through snow, go up to each house, stick the paper in the door or wherever and then trudge on…then you got to try to collect money on Saturdays and people would pretend not to be at home (you could see them through the curtains) or claim to have lost their wallet or whatever. On rare occasions you got a small tip, and at Christmas you sometimes got better tips that would make it all worthwhile.
It paid fairly well (for those days, and being a kid and all) but after about two months, I gave the route over to a friend who actually kept if for a few years.
So I don’t know if child labor laws have changed, but at least when I was growing up, 14 years old was a fairly normal age to be a paperboy - and yes, they really did only hire boys back then, no girls.