If you’ve followed Patrick at Popehat for any length of time, you will know that he’s got a short fuse.  Not a bad fuse, but a short one.  He’s not the sort of guy one would want to piss off.  But some telemarketer who called himself “Brian” did so, and riled Patrick up real good with just two words.  Bad move.

It seems that Brian called Patrick from “card services.”  You know “card services,” this nice folks who call each and every one of us regularly to let us know that they can reduce our credit card interest rates.  These fine and helpful people, along with the nice people who want to extend our auto warranty, have a recorded message requiring us to hit 1 to speak with a representative.  Most of the time, if the wrong word comes out of your mouth first, the next sound you hear is “click”.  I always say the wrong thing when I press 1, because I always hear “click”.  They do not seem to have much respect for the federal “do not call” registry.

Patrick said the wrong thing as well, but he didn’t hear click.  Instead, he heard two words that still resonate in his ears. The sound is not pleasing.

Patrick says he’s determined to find the nice folks at card services and make them unhappy.  He’s got a number on his caller ID, but I suspect he won’t find anyone at the other end of the phone in Omaha.  The word is that these people hang out in the Orlando, Florida area.  Apparently, this is where they train for gainful employment at Disney World.

The question I have is somewhat different than Patrick’s.  I don’t ask where they are so I can fly down to Florida on the next Airbus, rent a wreck to drive to their boiler room and beat the living daylights out of Brian.  Rather, I wonder why, given that these folks seem to call, well, everyone there is on a daily basis, no one from our federal government has seen fit to shut them down. 

Sure, this isn’t a terrible crime in the sense of murder or possession of cartoon pornography, but still it seems to be beyond the ability of the ordinary citizen to fix, and in violation of a few federal laws.  Of course, it can have some very harmful consequences, whether by tying up a phone line when needed in an emergency, or interrupting something critical under the mistaken belief that the call is legitimate.  But it’s the pervasiveness of the problem that seems to demand that it be dealt with.  Few issues affect as many people as this, a credit to autodialing.

My guess is that the government is far too busy doing border searches for terrorists and pornographers to spend its time tracking down telemarketers.  I can well understand, given the danger pornographers present to our homeland security, but doubt that it would really require that much of a dedication of scarce resources that it couldn’t be done.

Here’s my thought.  All that would be needed is two special agents and a geek, preferably a hacker.  The two agents will only be needed for the collar and processing; they don’t bring much else to the table.  The government need only create a contest for geeks to locate the source of these telemarketing calls, sifting through the fake telephone numbers to their home server, and making it blow up.  Then the agents swoop in and cuff the big guys, who are likely an unattractive married couple.  It seems like it’s always an unattractive married couple doing this sort of stuff.

And you really wouldn’t have to offer much of a prize to the geek to who did the dirty work.  A nice badge for the website and bragging rights would likely be all the incentive they need.  Hacking is less a matter of reward than the pride of being able to beat the system.

If this seems too much trouble, how about finding out where the credit card money went from those where are taken in by these telemarketers.  Hard as it is to imagine, somebody has to actually agree to pay these nice folks or they would be forced to go back to their day jobs at Dairy Queen.

It just strikes me that even though these telemarketing calls are more annoyance than anything else, anything that annoys essentially everyone in the country, including Patrick, might be worthy of a little attention.  Come on, government.  You can find a crime for pretty much everyone.  You can fix this.  I know you can.