I've Had It - I Turned My Phone Off

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

(It’s time for this again, isn’t it? :smiley: )

Three, four, five times a day - calls from banks, real estate agents, telemarketers, charities, companies making courtesy calls, companies telling us that our cars are due for maintenance, machines that didn’t say anything, machines that called three and a half rings and hung up before my answering machine picked up - it seemed like it was never ending. I work from home in the afternoons, and am home most evenings, and the phone just never stopped ringing.

I turned the ringer off on both of my phones, and the silence is absolutely blessed. I told my family that the phones are off, and if they want to contact me, they have to leave a message, or at least start talking so I will pick up. I’m loving it!

I have to send a big, fat, “screw you all” to the companies that necessitated this, though. My phone, that I pay good money for every month, is MY DAMNED PHONE, NOT YOUR MARKETING TOOL. Come to think of it, I should just cancel the land line and just use our cells. Hmm. Must think on this.

And no, Canada does not have a “do not call” registry, and it probably wouldn’t help if we did, because half of my nuisance calls weren’t even telemarketers, just plain old nuisances. Bleah. I just read that they estimate 100 million U.S. households have signed up for the DNR registry - can you take a big, freakin’ hint, pesterers?

2

Isn’t DNR Do Not Resuscitate? :wink: Or is it really called DNR? I don’t know.

My parents signed up for the Do Not Call thing right away. It’s nice - our phone used to ring ALL THE TIME and it was ALWAYS telemarketers. It was so annoying. I’d be home alone a lot, reading, sleeping, watching TV. Phone rings, I get up to go answer it, ALWAYS a friggin telemarketer. Or someone for my brother. Now the phone hardly ever rings - it’s nice. But I don’t live there anymore.

I’ve never gotten a call on my cell from anyone like that. I would be quite pissed if I did. Is that illegal?

3

Do you have caller ID? If so why not just answer calls from incoming numbers you recognise? Ignore the rest.

4

I dumped my landline a few months ago, and I’ve never looked back. Sure, it’s a little annoying- I have to keep my cellphone near me at all times, even when I’m at home (I’ve got a fairly large house), but damn, it’s nice. I haven’t had a telemarketer call in months.

I’m thinking about going with a VoIP system, and setting my phone so that it forwards the call if I’ve got it in the cradle. That’d rock, but I’m not sure it’s worth the extra money it’d take to set it up.

5

There was a recent thread about giving up landlines in favour of cell phones, I think.
I have had neither a land line, nor a junk call, in years. :slight_smile:
I also have designated ring tones for regular callers - I think you can do this with all cell phones now.
Plus (for me) the cell phone is cheaper. Long distance calls are free, and there’s insanely cheap calling cards for international calls.

6

Cell phones can get telemarketers too, so beware. Nowhere near as many as the average landline gets, but it’s on the rise.

7

I’ve occasionally received “unavailable” calls (which I usually don’t answer) and no message has been left. Maybe telemarketing?

8

[hijack] we just got VoIP, as well as switching from DSL to cable internet provided by our cable company, and our combined phone/cable tv/internet bills went down by HALF. It cost us half of one of the old months’ rates to switch to VoIP, and now our telephone bill is less than $17 a month, *including *all the taxes and fees! I love it.[/hijack]

9

I guess I wasn’t clear enough in my OP - it’s not talking to them I mind so much, but the fact that they ring my phone in my nice, quiet house all the time. Sure I can ignore it, but that doesn’t stop the ringing.

10

We just got vonage and dumped our land line.

We haven’t received one sales call on the VoIP line. :smiley:

I’m sold.

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[merrily continuing hijack]I’m intrigued, and would love to cut my phone/cable/internet in half, tell me more? What is this VoIP? My email addy is in my profile if you don’t want to keep the thread diverting to Cuba.[/merry hijack]

12

The only reason I keep my landline is because that is the number I give to people I really don’t want to speak with…plus it is the number of record for all my utility companies, etc. I have the ringer off, and the answering machine on silent. So occasionally I will look up, see a bunch of messages, listen, delete, listen, delete, etc.

All of my friends and family have my cell phone number.

I have a cable hook up to my computer.

My landline is just for junk calls, and if it were not for the fact that I always have to give a phone number to the utilities and other businesses, I would have dropped it ages ago. I have to admit, since signing every “do not call” list there is, the messages from telemarketers has dropped significantly even on the landline and I have only received a few on my cell - but I think those were just random computer generated calls.

13

I work nights; in fact I just got home and am happily munching a McDonalds Deluxe breakfast. My darling Marcie unplugs all the upstairs phones before she leaves for work, otherwise I wouldn’t get any sleep at all. As soon as I plug the damn things in, they begin ringing and they keep on ringing. And we are registered on the national do not call thing.

14

We signed up for it right away, too. We have Caller ID, too, which is great - if I don’t know the caller, I don’t answer it.
We’re considering getting rid of our landline and just using our cell phones, and this is one of the reasons - it’s not so much telemarketers, but just the various stupid calls.
On weekends, I usually remember to turn the ringers off on both phones, so no one bothers us. I forgot a few weeks ago, though.
Someone from the service department at the Chevy dealer called about my husband’s truck - just one of those, “We haven’t see in a while, you must be in need of an oil change or engine servicing, would you like to set up an appointment?”
At 8:00 a.m. on a Saturday. I hung up on her.

15

The Do Not Call list has worked beautifully for us. I hope your government adopts it. Greatest thing since sliced bread.

16

I’ve been getting a lot of calls lately too.
Generally the Calgary Herald and the Cerebral Palsy Association of Alberta.
At least the CPAA shows on call display, so I can just not pick up.
The Herald now…doesn’t seem to understand that if I didn’t want to get the Herald last week, or the week before, or the week before that - that I might still not be interested in getting the Herald, no matter how much of a deal they claim it is.
Grrr.
I wish we had a do not call list.

17

The telemarketers were bad enough but I also got a lot of wrong numbers - often from the same people. I got so frustrated that I started using this software.

The program keys off the CallerID and you can program different behaviors for different callers or groups. I use it to announce the name of family or friends as the phone rings for a few times. It acts like a regular answering machine if I don’t pick up. Repeated wrong number callers get picked up silently and the moron is told they’ve messed up AGAIN. Telemarketers get the “not a working number” tones followed by a message telling them such calls are unwanted. New callers go directly to an answering machine until their number can be classified. Voice messages and faxes get converted to attachments and e-mailed to me.

I love it. I get tickled looking at the log and seeing how many annoyances have been prevented. Now I enjoy giving out and filling in forms with my phone number.

18

And they’re so SURPRISED when you say you don’t want their free papers for a month or whatever. Listen, sunshine, if that free month comes with free taking that shitload of papers to the recycling bins, I might POSSIBLY consider it; otherwise, you just bothered me for no reason whatsoever. Come to think of it, I’m surprised that telepesterers aren’t putting me on their “Do not call” list. :smiley:

19

I love the Do-not-call list. It’s made such a difference. We were getting 2, 3, 4 or even more calls a night…then when the list kicked in; blissful, wonderful silence.

However the last couple of weeks there’s been a little spike in telemarketing activity. We have caller ID, and I don’t pick up the phone in these cases, but I’ve noticed suddenly we’re getting calls from numbers labelled “XYZ Research” or “ABC Survey Co”.

I’m wondering if some telemarketing lawyer has decided that there’s a loophole in the law, and you can call people if you claim to be performing a ‘survey’. Then, once someone participates in their ‘survey’, the telemarketer can claim that they now have a business relationship with you, and are allowed to pester you with marketing calls.

20

Back when I had a land line I paid $3 extra every month for an unlisted, unpublished number. It was wonderful; I couldn’t have gotten more than one telemarketer once every two months or so. Maybe less.