I realized just how much I appreciated it when I recently moved apartments and got a new land line. I was getting telemarketer calls 3-5 times a day. Holy shit.
It took a few weeks for them to taper off, but now - it’s sweet, sweet peace.
My junk calls dropped off but then picked up again. I have two lines; one is unlisted, and I get no unwanted calls on it.
The other line is answered only by my computer answering machine. I get 1-5 calls per day on it, where they never leave a message (a hallmark of autodialers). I get a lot of junk faxes for cut-rate travel scams. Once I called the company and told them it was illegal to send unsolicited faxes, and they said no it’s not, if you provide an 800 number to have your name taken off, and she hung up on me. I found out that’s not true in the US but it is in Canada, so there are lots of ways to skirt US law if you’re willing to operate just outside its borders. There is absolutely no way to prevent a caller from outside the country to call your do-not-call number.
If you do what I did, sign up for DNC, change your number and un-list your number at the same time, it works immediately! 
(I was working nights and some idiot friend of my husband’s couldn’t grasp that, plus I was getting woke up by timeshare companies 2-3 times a week.)
I may be incriminating myself to the people on the board by revealing this, but I work as a telefundraiser for a nonprofit organization. I can tell you at least about how my (US) nonprofit organization’s telemarketing system works, and hopefully help you avoid dealing with more of these calls in the future.
Hanging up on us does you no good. If you don’t let us tell you who we are, we’ll call you back in a couple of days. If you let us say our name but tell us you’re “not interested” and hang up, we’ll call you back once we go on a new calling campaign (usually about a month or so). If you want us to stop contacting you, you have to do more than say “I’m on ‘the list’” and hang up. You have to wait for us to tell you that, as a nonprofit organization, we’re exempt from the rules of do-not-call lists and after that, specifically request to be removed from our internal list. For the most part, hanging up on us before we say “we have removed you from our records, thank you for your time”, will be fruitless. Like Shagnasty said, ask to be removed, don’t demand it, and we’ll do it for you.
Tony Montana and desdinova, as for cell phone calls, those are genuinely an accident, and we do remove those numbers from our records if we call them (and the person actually tells us that we have reached a cell number, that is. Usually we can’t actually see the number we are calling and can’t tell if we’ve reached someone at home or not).
Also, please remember, if there is a real person on the line, you are talking to a real person. Don’t treat them like you would an automated call. They are just doing their job (for a company which, having no previous work experience, may have been the only employer that would accept them for an interview coughmy personal experiencecough), and they may genuinely feel apologetic for annoying you. Not everyone I call treats me like dirt, most are actually fairly considerate of me. But if you want to be the one that stands out as the “inconsiderate jerk of the hour”, by all means, be an inconsiderate jerk.
And dwc1970, as an ex-political campaign caller, I can tell you that saying “you just lost a vote” to me isn’t the greatest insult to a person who’s just volunteering so she can fulfill a requirement for her government class. 
I’m not out to insult political callers. I just like to let them know that calling me to ask for a vote is a counterproductive method of campaigning.
Believe me, when I choose to be an inconsiderate jerk to somebody who keeps harassing me with unwanted phone calls, I will be the inconsiderate jerk of the decade.
Well, here’s hoping your number never appears on my calling list, Cervaise. I’m sure we both would be much happier that way. 
dwc1970, I personally don’t understand the reasoning behind political campaigns that ask for votes, either. Surely people would vote for a candidate for a better reason than because a stranger on the telephone asked them to? (On the same token, I would hope that same person would not vote against a candidate because of a calling campaign. Personally, I’d vote against someone because I don’t trust their political maneuverings or don’t agree with their stances on relevant issues that would be addressed while they are in office.) Thankfully, that’s never the kind of calling I did; I called only to confirm votes by registered party members. Which still seems somewhat pointless, since eventually the party would find out how they voted anyway at election time. shrugs
Holy crow, I just read your legendary rant.
wow
:eek:
Worked well until about three months ago. Then I started getting calls. When I asked the name of the company, the person who called would hang up, and the number on my caller ID was either faked or was a bunch of zeroes.
I also got calls from a local radio station urging me to listen to their morning show. This was annoying because it was not a live person but a recording, and I couldn’t just hang the phone up–it tied up my phone for the duration of the recording, whether I listened to it or not. I have reported them twice in the last month.
I shudder to think how many calls I’d get if I didn’t have DNC. I’d probably have to give up the phone. I’m basing this on an email account that I did have to give up because it was 200+ spam messages a day.
You know, most radio stations take live calls… a few times calling in reminding them on air about the DNCL might get things moving. Or your FCC.