astro
May 5, 2004, 6:59pm
1
I’m so jealous I didn’t get this idea first.
‘Vent-Line’ Irks Counselors
BOSTON (Reuters) - Licensed mental health professionals are steamed over a Maine entrepreneur who charges angry people $1.99 a minute to listen to them rant and rave over the telephone.
Philip Doyen receives between 10 and 20 phone calls a week to “Vent-Line,” a service he launched in February that allows callers to blow off steam – at a price.
But some professional counseling services aren’t happy about Doyen’s business and are urging prosecutors to investigate whether he is breaking any state laws, the Portland Press Herald newspaper reported on Tuesday.
“For some people, venting is going to upset them more,” Leslie Brancato of the Community Counseling Center in Portland, Maine, told the paper. “That he’s charging $1.99 a minute is, in my opinion, totally exploitative.”
Doyen, who works as a computer repairman when not operating Vent-Line, says he has dozens of customers along the U.S. East Coast.
“I’m in it for the money, like everybody else,” the Press Herald quoted him as saying. “If it helps people, great.”
Zebra
May 5, 2004, 7:24pm
2
I’ve seen a homeless guy with a sign that reads “Bitch at me! 5$”.
There’s a free local newspaper, the Montreal Mirror, with a section called the Rant Line . People call up and leave their rant on an answering machine. And it’s free! The paper prints a few good ones every week, and some of them are hysterical.
Hey, it is sort of like The Pit except you have to pay to rant…
oh, wait… nevermind…
Yes, but we get to go on for more than 2.5 minutes for our fiver.
I might have to call him myself to rant about the morons in the article who think the guy is exploiting people.
