Telemarketers, Be Gone!

You forget about these things. Changing one of our telephone numbers from a land-line to Verzion FIOS involved dropping the old number and getting a new one. One minor annoyance is that Verizon (copper) and Verizon FIOS don't seem to talk much, so Verizon (copper) never seems to put a change-of-number message on our old number. We've called, emailed, etc., it's been two weeks, and still nothing.

That, however, is not the major problem. The major problem is that we'd forgotten the persistence of telemarketers. Hence we didn't sign the new number up on the National Do Not Call Registry.

Oops.

It took telemarketers about 10 days to figure this out. Since Saturday, we've had a bunch of telemarketing calls. Of course, once I realized the mistake I immediately registered the number, but since it hasn't filtered through the system yet, we still get a few calls, including the annoying machine call that was half cut off by our answering machine's greeting.

It makes you appreciate the fact that the Do-Not-Call list is a Federal program that actually works. OK, a few calls get through, but the volume of calls we got on the old number was next-to-nothing, and now we're getting them daily.

Now if there was just an enforceable do-not-spam law.

Note: Why, in the name of all that's holy, would any marketing firm suppose that anyone would respond well to a call placed at 9 am anytime between Christmas and New Year's Day? It's almost anti-marketing. Hint: I'm sure not going to buy anything from DISH network any time soon.