On Fri, 19 Sep 2008 01:57:27 -0500, the infamous Richard J Kinch
scrolled the following:

Joseph Gwinn writes:

Please don't confuse strategy with mouth-foaming.

My point is simply that the soliciting/bill-collection scum ringing my
phone oughta be horsewhipped, but it's not worth raising my heart rate to
so much as engage in a conversation with them, much less get
confrontational.

This year, I'd been getting two or three calls a week from heavily
accented Philipinas in NYC. One company goes by the names of something
Contact or Contact somethingorother. After the tenth call, I finally
started asking them straight out "If you can't get something straight
with their stupid software like putting someone on their own Do Not
Call List, what POSSIBLE good could it do for me?" and hanging up. I
had to threaten (four times in one week) to complain to the Feds
before they finally stopped, and that was only after I actually did
feed their number into the Do Not Call List complaint form online at
https://www.donotcall.gov/complaint/complaintcheck.aspx

Yesterday, within ten minutes, I received two calls from the same
boiler-room company selling search engine optimization for my website.
I think they may have been Indian women, but their accents were
extremely heavy and phone system horrible. What I could hear was very
distant sounding. sigh

Now, when I hear an Indian accent, I immediately ask if this is a
sales call. When they inevitably say "Yes", I immediately say "Please
put me on your Do Not Call List" and hang up. Before that, they'd call
and offer to do my web programming for me at a wonderfully discounted
cost. When I said no, they'd ask why and I'd tell them that when I
have overflow proggin' to do, I give it to someone local, keeping
Americans at work. A few got really hostile at that and I chuckled
into the phone as I hung up on them. Now I don't waste the time. But
if another one calls, I'll use the "Can you hold on for a minute?"
trick and keep them on the phone as long as possible, letting them
hear me keying on the computer in the background. Sounds delicious!


Yeah, I could threaten, or actually sue them for a $1K federal violation,
but life would be pretty grim doing that for a living. And no doubt they
are judgment-proof.

Yeah, just like the fact that damned -political- calls are outside the
jurisdiction of the Do Not Call List regulations. Grrrrrrrrrrrrrr!

I'll kiss the person who invents a way to deliver a load of rocksalt
(or a computer virus) to the asshole solicitors on the other side of
all these bloody phone calls.

--
Once we believe in ourselves, we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous
delight, or any experience that reveals the human spirit.
--e e cummings