For a while, it was quiet.  The phone no longer rang with accented voices pitching things we would never buy.  It was quiet, peaceful, when we ate, chatted and relaxed.

No more.  It started with calls from “unavailable” numbers, computerized voices imploring us to push 1 if we wanted a credit card or to extend our auto warranty.  The calls continued, some with numbers which, when googled, revealed themselves as notorious violators of the Do Not Call Registry.  Complaints were filed, but the calls continued.

Then more calls, with real voices, about mortgages and credit readily available to us, no matter who we were.  When asked who they were, click.

This is the American entrepreneurial spirit hard at work, finding ways to circumvent laws and common decency, all because they can.  Whether the product of technological advancement, if one can call the ability to conceal one’s identity an advancement, it appears that someone is trying to make the most of bad economic times.

Someone must answer the phone and say to the person on the other end, “yes, yes, I want your service so very much,” or they wouldn’t continue to do it.  No one at my house says this, yet they continue to call, sometimes 20 times a week from the same vendor.   In the beginning, I would register a complaint.  It’s no longer worth the effort.

The Do Not Call registry does not work.  But for anyone inclined to cold call me in the hope that I might possibly listen to your pitch or, better still, purchase from you, don’t bother.  I won’t.

And if no one else does either, maybe they will go away.  But like promises of vast wealth from the Nigerian lottery, or Hong Kong businesses blindly seeking legal representation or amorphous police unions demanding donations if they want the cops to show next time a masked man appears at their door, there will always be someone who somehow doesn’t know to just hang up.

Update:  I should have included this in the first place, but had a CRS flare-up.  But here is the all-time best ever telemarketer prank: