The Federal Do Not Call List is up (sometimes) and you can plug in your phone number and those nasty telemarketers can’t bother you any more. Don’t call the phone number for this list, however. Apparently, it’s really really close to the 800 number for a plumbing company and the poor bastard who owns it has been besieged by calls. On MSNBC, he said that his phone company, Qwest, is going to make him pay for the calls and the tab so far is something like $50K!:eek:
My husband (bless him!) signed us up about 5 minutes after he woke up yesterday.
When do we get the national “don’t send me spam you &*#(@$ e-tailers!” list?
Hey, it’s taken this long for the government to figure out we hate telemarketers, it’ll be another few years for spammers.
Heh, it’s like Christmas come early. According to the front page of The Washington Post they were at one point getting hit with 108 calls per second! The government was expecting a huge number of calls and website hits but it blew away anything they were expecting. I hate those damn telemarketers, and the only thing I’m going to miss is coming up with new ways of torturing them when I tell them for the third time that I’m interested and they continue with their speil.
Except there’s a whole raft of companies that can still call:
This is taken from the consumer FAQ:
http://donotcall.gov/FAQ/FAQConsumers.aspx#Exceptions
I’m gonna call them during dinner time & sign up.
Actually, Mooney, the FCC got behind it and those rules now apply to intrastate calls, faxes, common carriers, banking, and airlines.
See: http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/dowjones/20030626/bs_dowjones/200306261117000872
Those exemptions suck. Most of my telemarketing calls come from banks wanted to send me a ‘free’ trial credit card, and long distance companies. Why do they get a free ride?
At least now the telemarketers for these companies will have to explain over and over about the exemption when they call people on the Do Not Call List.
I hate that long-distance phone companies are exempt…they’re the most annoying!
We’ve got something similar, and supposedly better in our state, and they still get thru. I still get about one day, including the "you’ve won a free trip’ automated messages on my machine when I get home.
Long-distance companies are the worst, but Politicians are a close second, and they can still call. With all those exceptions, makes me wonder who they are going to stop.
You’ll still get them, I just feel less guilty when I hang up on them now.
I just wanted to say thank you for the link, Tuckerfan. I had heard rumblings, but didn’t know it was so darn easy!
I’m not going to sign up.
Why?
Because I do not want to say, “Oh, Big Brother, I can’t handle this, will you take care of it for me?”
I am quite capable of screening my calls or saying, “No, thank you,” and hanging up. Plus, we don’t get that many calls, maybe one a month.
I am not slamming anyone for signing up. I know some people get dozens of calls a week and find them extremely intrusive. But as a libertarian, I have a issue with letting gov’t solve a problem that I can handle on my own.
Now, if everyone else signs up and all the telemarketers have to call is me and no one else, I might change my mind.
I just don’t find telemarketers intrusive enough in my life that I need to sign up for this. YMMV, of course.
Very, very well paid lobbiests and lots of donations to politicians. As for why solicitations from political organizations are exempted too, I’ll leave that as an exercise to the reader.
Haj
I did away with my landline about a year ago and I have never recieved a telemarketing call on my cell phone. Has anyone else? The only unwanted calls I get are from people who misdial or have outdated information. They usually apologize and hang up though 
My cellphone gets a lot of “Caller ID Blocked” and calls with no number, but I don’t answer them. I assume they’re telemarketers.