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Author Topic: Telezapper Jack Ondracek Film God Posts: 2348 From: Port Orchard, WA, USA Registered: Oct 2002 posted 12-19-2002 02:12 PM                        One that really irritates me is where my phone rings & when I answer, a recording says "I have a call for you... unfortunately, all of our representatives are busy right now. Please wait for the next... blah blah blah"... Where did these people find their programmers? From doctors' offices? Rather than be somewhat less than polite to the unknown "representative", I just hang up on this system. I've always felt that if they want to talk to me that bad then I shouldn't have to wait for them to get around to me.  |  IP: Logged Steve Kraus Film God Posts: 4094 From: Chicago, IL, USA Registered: May 2000 posted 12-19-2002 03:18 PM                    That's because the boiler room operations want to keep their people talking to someone constantly and given the number of no-answers and answering machines they have their computer dial many numbers in order to snag a single live human and then they connect them to a telemarketer. Sometimes there's not a free telemarketer so the hapless recipient of the call gets silence and a hangup click. It was announced yesterday that there will be a national do not call list. Part of the new rules will require that calls such as I've described will have to have a recording telling the called party what happened. Those who said they had Telezappers and found them useless, how long of a try did you give it? I would think it would take a while to get dropped from various lists. And you did have Caller ID, right? Isn't CID necessary for the device to work, spitting out the 3-tone dead number signal when it sees that CID is null or blocked?  |  IP: Logged Jack Ondracek Film God Posts: 2348 From: Port Orchard, WA, USA Registered: Oct 2002 posted 12-19-2002 04:36 PM                        quote: Isn't CID necessary for the device to work, spitting out the 3-tone dead number signal when it sees that CID is null or blocked? No... it plays the first SIT tone immediately when the called party picks up the phone (or an answering machine connects). Connection isn't immediate, so you only hear one tone about half the length of normal. It works by sensing the phone going on/off hook... so if you answer a "call waiting" call and then come back, the first caller will hear the tone again. Some zapper models will allow you to play out the entire 3-tone series... but I'd think that might confuse callers. We heard about that national "do not call" list on the news yesterday. They say the penalty for calling a number on that list could get as high as 11k$  |  IP: Logged Dave Williams Wet nipple scene Posts: 1836 From: Salt Lake City, UT, USA Registered: Jan 2000 posted 12-19-2002 09:18 PM                        The "do not call" national list is a proposal to congress by the FTC. If passed all anyone needs do is put your name and number on it just once. Telemarketers will be required to constantly update with the national list. Those operations that do not will be heavily fined, and hopefully put out of business. With this in mind... it will take no time at all to put telemarketers out of business. Makes me wonder what kind of lobby power they have with congressional memebers? Pay the right ones and it dies. Remember children, power of the people, by the people, and for the people, is only a fairy tale. Dave  |  IP: Logged Gerard S. Cohen Jedi Master Film Handler Posts: 975 From: Forest Hills, NY, USA Registered: Sep 2001 posted 12-19-2002 09:52 PM                     I used Scott's approach, the NY State Do Not Call list, on both my home and office lines. It took several months to notice the difference, but now we get only an occassional telemarketing call. I haven't had success with unwanted faxes, though. They seldom contain the FCC legally required sender's fax number and name. Once I got one from a chiropractor whose telephone number was included, and I called him, stating the penalties, and he apologized abjectly and said he would immediately remove my number. But two more faxes arrived from him in the next two weeks. Most annoying were faxes from someone in the U.K. running a "survey", each time asking only one question "Are you for or against gun control [or abortion rights, smoking, etc.]" The sender was asked to call a 900 number (at $3.95 per minute) to answer Yes or No. It helpfully listed, in very fine print, the info that the average call cost $6.95, (but if they put you on hold, the sky could be the limit!) With a phone I can just hang up. But with a fax, I don't know if it's possible to stop receiving a junk fax before it ends without screwing up the fax machine.  |  IP: Logged Steve Kraus Film God Posts: 4094 From: Chicago, IL, USA Registered: May 2000 posted 12-21-2002 08:08 PM                    The telemarketers are raising First Amendment concerns but I see no problem with the new regs and I am a near absolutist when it comes to the First Amendment. This is not the government telling them not to call but private individual telephone users and the government is only requiring them to respect our wishes.  |  IP: Logged Scott Norwood Film God Posts: 8146 From: Boston, MA. USA (1774.21 miles northeast of Dallas) Registered: Jun 99 posted 12-21-2002 09:11 PM                        Interesting that they raise first-amendment issues, since commercial speech doesn't usually have the same level of protection afforded to political speech, and there are already far more severe restrictions on commercial speech than requiring that marketers respect a "do not call" list. It really irks me when email spammers raise first-amendment issues, too. Their right to free speech doesn't extend to requiring me to subsidize their advertising (by supplying disk space, network bandwidth, etc.). I'm ordinarily a strong proponent of civil liberties and free speech, but some of these lobbyists are taking the idea a bit too far.  |  IP: Logged

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