Sep 22 2007
The Phones Will Be Ringing During Dinner Again!
Found this bit of bad news while perusing Memeorandum on the latest news stories out in the blogoshpere. It seems the nights of endless phone solicitations at home are about to come roaring back because someone in Congress did not make the registration process for not being harassed at night a permanent thing:
When you registered with the do not call list back in 2002, you probably thought you were set for life. Well, it turns out that wasn’t entirely the case. It was actually only good for a 5-year hiatus on phone calls during dinner.
Do you think anyone is thinking, “after 5 years, I kind of miss those phone solicitations?†Not likely.
So, the obvious thing to do would be to extend the list, right? Fortunately, a pro-people Democrat from Pennsylvania is trying to do just that:
But Rep. Mike Doyle, D-Pa., says people should not be forced to re-register to keep telemarketers at bay. Doyle introduced legislation this week, with bipartisan support, to make registrations permanent.
Now this is a great proposal and I could care less if it being proposed by a Democrat. In fact, if the democrats spent more time on these issues and stop trying to end our victory over al-Qaeda in Iraq they would be in serious contention for a sweep in 2008. Anyway, we should all back this proposal – just for OUR OWN sanity.
The rational for unblocking after five years is that many people change numbers. If you get a new number that the previous person had blocked you are also blocked and do not know it because you don’t get any calls. Millions of people want calls.
I was surprised when I discovered the five year limit, but re-registering took a couple minutes.
This would all be easier if the phone company handled the blocks, but they don’t. If they did part of the setup of a new number would be a question about blocking. When a number was given up, it would auto-reset to unblocked.
A law requiring a permanent block would eventually lead to all numbers being blocked and thus is a poor idea. Might as well just ban calls outright and save the creation of a list or implement DO CALL list.
I registered with the state no call program a year before I registered with the National thing. Yet I still get calls from people with foreign accents and ID unavailable trying to sell me stuff. Most of these callers appear to have Chinese acdents. When I rudely hang up on them they call back and let the phone ring sometimes 15 to 20 times. The program may have worked to screen out some callers but it didn’t stop them all.
Somewhere it was suggested that the list is already managed once a month for changed numbers. If this is so there is NO reason to sunset a listing…..