At our house we would get about 2 per evening and it was always when we were eating. They would also call during the day on the weekends. The Do Not Call list has to be one of the best things that was put into effect becasue they stopped coming afterwards. If they could only find a way to do this for spam.
I feel for the folks that get those calls. Where you live, area code, must make a BIG difference. I’m not on any do not call lists and I get a couple a year.
Another person here who used to get two or three sales calls a day until the DNC list went into effect. Now we get one a month, if that. When I was a kid, we used to get calls from this one outfit - no idea what they were selling, I never got as far as the sales pitch because they used one of those pre-recorded greetings: “We have an important call for you, but all our operators are busy. Please hold.” We used to get two to three calls a day just from them. They’d only call during the day, when I was the only person home. And then it started escalating. Two to three calls became five to six. Five to six became eight or nine. Finally, one day, they called for every ten minutes for two hours straight. Finally, the phone rang for the fifteenth time in a row, I grabbed it, a voice said “Is Ann there?” and I screamed “She’s not fucking here, you idiot! Stop calling us!” and slammed the phone down.
Then I realized, “Hey… that wasn’t a pre-recorded message.” It was a friend of my mom’s, calling to confirm a lunch date. :smack: Luckily, once I explained to my mom why I’d accidentally cursed out her friend, she made a call to the police department (IIRC, maybe the Better Business Bureau?) and got them to stop calling us completely. And I didn’t get in any trouble outside of having to call her friend and apologize.
Still, it was a good ten years until we got the DNC and got the rest of the bastards to leave us alone. Best piece of legislation ever, if’n you ask me. Now we need one to make it legal to hunt and kill these people, and I’ll have everything I could possibly want out of a representational democracy.
I was also in the 5-6 a day group. Then I signed on to the DNC list and it dropped to 2-3 a week. Now I’m a cell-only girl with no telemarketing calls.
The worst one was when they would call at 8 AM on Saturday and open with “Good morning! How are you doing today?!?!” Not too good after you woke me up on my day off! :mad:
The magical do not call list has helped me out ginormously, but like Johnathan I’m in a too-close-to-call state so I’m getting tons of political calls as well. I wish I could find a nice way to tell the lovely and polite ladies from the Purple Heart charity that I’m kind of a simplistic consumer who’ll never have any offering for them, but they’re so polite and quick when they call I feel like I can’t be mean.
Amusingly, a majority of them think I’m a hispanic republican, even though I’m registered as an independant and don’t speak spanish. Some company decided my (ex)husband’s slightly latin-sounding surname meant that we spoke spanish and I’ve been recieving telemarketing calls in espanol ever since, along with numerous offers for stuff like “Latina Today! The magazine just for you!” And since everyone understands that blacks are always democrats and hispanics are always pubbies, voila. :rolleyes: