They don’t necessarily have to be sharing only one line (a wall-mounted landline from the look of it), he just doesn’t want to answer the phone that is ringing.
Well, to be fair, it IS from eight years ago, when landlines weren’t quite so quaint…
We have a landline (well kind of, it’s VOIP). Definitely nobody calls it that you would want to pick up and talk to.
Has pretty much everyone gotten rid of their landline? (We haven’t.) I expect most (not all) households to have separate cell phones for separate people, but didn’t think it was crazy unusual to have one shared landline.
I finally dropped my landline about a year ago.
But… there’s more than a bit of assumption involved in jumping from “they have a landline” to “the landline is the only phone anyone in the house has access to.”
We have only a landline. (My wife had a rarely-used flip phone, but it died a couple of months ago and she hasn’t gotten around to replacing it yet.) We have an answering machine on the landline, and don’t pick up until someone “real” starts to leave a message (all of our regular contacts know this, but of course there are occasional calls from doctor’s offices or such involving people who don’t).
Since we don’t pick up automatically, we can usually count on four to six hang-up calls a day, plus one or two robot scammers who do leave their scam messages on the machine. The number usually rises during political campaign season. (Oh, once or twice a week we also get a longish buzz from something that’s convined we’re a fax machine.)
I can certainly identify with the guy on the roof.
I have an old copper landline. AT&T is making noises about replacing it with fiber. I use Google Voice as my number a lot, as people who insist can text me at that number. The landline has an answering machine, so I never pick up unless I’m expecting a call. Most scammers don’t bother to leave messages.
I had the same landline number for 25 years, and during the first part of that, I was married so it was also on record as being a number where you could reach her. That turned out to be a problem, as she left behind a substantial number of bill collectors, none of whom would take my word for it that I was not her and that it was not possible to reach my ex-wife at my number.
They’d use an autodialer that would call up, once per day, and not detect that it was talking to an answering machine. They’d tell me how urgent it was that I call them back right away. Every six months or so, the debt would get sold to some other collector who’d try to collect my ex-wife’s debts from me. The reason I could tell is that the autodialer would have a new and different phone number that it was urgent that I call right away.
I also had a very stupid answering machine that wouldn’t let me delete a message until the entire message had been played. On the one hand, this was amazingly annoying. On the other hand, I sure as heck wasn’t going to go spend any money buying new answering machine technology.
Basically, I kept paying for that phone for years for one reason and one reason only… so I could call 911 if I ever had a reason to.
Another side effect of having the same phone number for so long was that I got onto every phone spam listing that ever existed. I got EVERY phone spam… the push polls (from both right and left-wing interest groups), the “Microsoft” tech support, the “Apple” tech support, the “oh no, I got arrested overseas, and I need bail money, which you can send by buying Amazon gift cards and emailing the codes to me”, and my favorite, the “an arrest warrant has been issued in your name” one, only they used a very old database and tried to hit me up for cash to keep my ex-wife from being arrested. The scammer was not amused when I failed to produce any money, and instead asked if I could watch the arrest.
Ah, frosteddonut is quite correct: I’d forgotten that we were in summer rerun season.
Speaking of which… am I misremembering, or was today’s Arlo and Janis a CIDU just last year?
There isn’t any indication that there is more than one phone.
Did you mean a geezer tag for landline, or for something else because…. i don’t get this one.
Woozy, I meant that it won’t be long before landlines would be a geezer reference.
We still have our land line, and it has an answering machine, and I screen all our calls because despite being on the do-not-call list, we get calls like Shrug does. I do give out the number, as I’m home nearly all day and my cell is not unlimited (but it only costs me about $100 a year). Plus, landlines are useful in emergencies, not just to call 911, but if the power goes down or there’s a serious catastrophe, cell towers will be jammed or not working, but copper lines still work fine – assuming you have an old-style phone with a cord, which we do, down in the basement where you need a flashlight to find it, but it still works.
just a visual play on an old saying. The Far Side was a master at them, like when the couple next door waltzes in like they own the place….I too have a land line and the same number for nearly 30 years. The cell service is right on the edge of coverage so I guess I need to move to a neighborhood with more bars.
“There isn’t any indication that there is more than one phone.”
Nor any indication that there isn’t.
We’re still in the landline camp here too. It is used primarily by those calling my wife for her many appointments and anything that is household related. We’ve had the number a long time and we both already have mobile phones with long established numbers. The bill has crept up, inexorably, year after year. I see I can now get VOIP service (keeping the same number) for less than a third of what I’m paying the phone company. I’ve resisted that so long because I know POTS lines work when everything else is down, but so far in my lifetime that has involved a few power outages. It’s really seeming to not seem worth it.
S. Bill… I switched my landline from copper to Verizon (later Frontier) FIOS. Their system design includes a battery so that you can still make calls in a general power outage.
On the other hand, Frontier kept billing me for six months after I sold the house it was connected to… and they billed me at the new address, to which they did not provide service. Despite repeated efforts to convince them that I wasn’t going to pay for the service they were no longer providing to me, they turned over bill to a collection agency.
I don’t think I’ll ever buy telecomm service from Frontier again.
But is a landline any different to the joke than digital phone service? You still have a phone in the house that rings.
The guy in this comic is literally above and beyond the phone call.
Whether his phone has a cord attached to it or not does not matter, nor does whether the family shares this phone.
Grawlix: If the family doesn’t share the phone it doesn’t make sense to hope that someone else will answer it.
I mean, yes, obviously the joke doesn’t make sense regardless, but it seems to me to be rooted in the idea of a shared phone.
Sorry – long.
Originally we had one phone line – 1979 copper wire. It was listed in my first initial, maiden name as Robert worked with children with emotional problems and this was cheaper than paying not to be listed, as well as friends and family, who of course knew my maiden name and that we were listed under same, could look up our number if they forgot it. We had an answering machine. Unfortunately the number we were assigned had belonged to a pediatrician and we had the number changed to the number we have now – which belonged to an attorney before it was ours, but much fewer calls for him and not panicked mothers. It was not until later that Domino’s pizza got a similar phone number and we started getting the wrong numbers for them, as well as for a optician shop and a TV repair shop – the latter closed and is now a phone number for a doctor, but it is the rarest of the 3 to get wrong numbers for and generally from hospitals or such and not patients.
When my dad became ill and I took over the practice and brought it home (as he had given notice on the office just before he became ill – so stored files went to parent’s house and current files came here) clients were given my home number to use. Unfortunately since it was my home number they would call me – on Sundays, when I was on vacation…. So we put in a second phone line and I gave clients that number to use, telling them that Robert did not always remember to give me messages and that was the extent of our phones for some time.
Husband was given a cell phone from/for work as he was director of the agency and on call 24/7/365. Later he convinced me to get a $10, pay by the minute cell phone so he could reach me if needed.
Then we decided he should quit his job and he did. Now, since he was not in one place all day, he wanted a cell phone, but he had turned his in when he left work. So we figured that if we got rid of the second (work) landline as I had much fewer clients, that would pay for his cell phone. We ended up taking a double plan as I had problems with changes with my cell phone co at that point and since then we have had one copper wire, landline and 2 cell phones (from an assortment of companies.
Then he started doing counseling online. One way that people could contact him was by phone – we did not want to give out our phone number, so he got a Magic Jack. He no longer does counseling by phone, but of course have kept the Magic Jack line.
Then Google offered him a Google number and he took it – it sends the call to our home landline,which has the advantage that we can give our that number to someone we hope to hear from once or rarely and block them if there is a problem, but the calls still come in at home.
We also got a Google number for our reenacting unit which used only have messages left at Google, but when there was an event it would be set to transfer the calls to my cell phone – the new unit Commander now has that phone number.
We also got a Google number for my embroidery chapter which only has messages left at Google.
Now when I need to make a call I stand there trying to figure out which phone/number to use! Well actually all calls are made on my cell phone (unlimited calls) so we don’t pay for the calls on the landline that is left as we have no minutes – it is basically for incoming calls – but toll free calls are made on that line and the fax machine uses it.
And yes, we still have the copper wire phone as worked straight through Hurricane Sandy and have had to argue to keep it. The backup batteries have limited life and having gone through 2 occasions about a year apart in which we had no electricity for just short of a week each time – beyond the backup battery life, we are staying with it until they pry it out of our hands. We call them when we drive past the connection box and the door to it is not only not locked, but open – and keep doing so until it locked and similar to make sure it keeps working.
Oh, and if we get 5 phone calls a day combined – almost everyone of them scam calls – it is a lot
James Pollock – my first cousin’s second wife was impressed by the neighborhood my mom lives in. (Not sure why, typical 1960s suburb.) So they bought a house up the street from my mom.
My cousin is now on his third wife. His second wife got to keep the house. While it has helped my mom when the kids were young as they would come and clean the snow at her house, his wife is in debt. My 89 year old mom gets threatening calls and letters for his wife as mom and she have the same last name and live on the same street.
My desk phone has an answering machine, and is “corded”. It functions as a telephone still when the power is out. If the power is out, I can go elsewhere. Then by calling the home number I can determine if the power is back on by whether the answering machine kicks in. I doubt I would bother with a FIOS setup if ATT gets rid of the copper.
” If the family doesn’t share the phone it doesn’t make sense to hope that someone else will answer it.”
And…
(It doesn’t make sense to crawl out on the roof to avoid answering a ringing phone, either.)
Folly, if you’re interested, look up NoMoRobo, it’s for VoIP lines. Incoming robocalls ring once, then are automagically vanished.
NoMoRobo is great; my cable company even includes it as a built-in option for their phone lines.
Nomorobo:
My milage varies: unless they’ve improved the call dumping so that it doesn’t even get as far as starting to ring, I’ve only ever had it dump one or two calls that I’ve noticed. I keep reporting numbers that get through, but I’ve recently started to despair, because the scammers just out and out fake the callerID, not just using unused numbers from a huge pool that they then quickly dump, but using actual real people’s numbers and callerID — unless they have access to some extra level of callerID, I don’t see any way to protect against this attack. If spammers now just regularly use a random real callerID that they can fake so I can’t tell (and presumably Nomorobo can’t tell), then I’m back to just not picking up any unknown number and being annoyed — Nomorobo can’t provide anything on top of that. (Plus, when I have guests from overseas, I never know what number they might be calling from, so I have to answer unknown calls anyway… Like I said, their blacklist has only ever stopped one or two calls that I’ve noticed…)
It is truly amazing what a sensible set of data privacy laws can do. German law forbids both robot calls and cold calling. If you aren’t already a customer, then they are not allowed to call you. This works not just in theory, but also in practice. I cannot remember the last time we got an (illegal) cold call from a German company.
There was a short period earlier this year when I received a number of spam calls on my mobile phone, but that was from a Swiss number. This was easy to defend against: I simply created a blacklist entry in the address book, and told the phone to refuse calls from that number. After that, they only made two or three more attempts.
For the most part, laws can only protect you from people who are willing to follow them.
At present, much of the phone spam originates in places that are far away, and it takes a smaller yield to make such calls profitable. I would expect that German companies can make more money by doing other things. In India, other opportunities for profitable enterprise are harder to come by.
It’s illegal here, as well, if you’re on the National Do Not Call Registry. That’s how I know that all the spam calls I get are from shady types. And unfortunately, it doesn’t cover calls from charities, pollsters, aldermen (there’s one on the north side who robocalls everybody in the city to ‘inform’ them of various things, all on the city’s dime) and other known ne’er-do-wells.
One of the more recent trends is callers (usually from India) claiming to represent the IRS telling you you have back taxes due and you have to pay right now or go to jail. They mostly end up catching old people who have disposable income and who are not as suspicious as they should be.
Caller ID (for us ordinary customers) is transmitted on the wire between the first and second ring, so the number can’t be identified until after the first ring. ANI or “automatic number identification” is something businesses can buy; the number comes in on a separate line. Technically, Caller ID is “in-band signalling” and ANI is “out-of-band signalling”.
“[Do not call] doesn’t cover calls from charities, pollsters, aldermen”
So far, all the politicians I called to be taken off their lists have complied. After all, they don’t want us to remember them as being annoying.
“So far, all the politicians I called to be taken off their lists have complied”
The point of being on the “Do Not Call” registry is that you don’t have to call people or organizations one-by-one to ask them not to call.
Calls from candidates aren’t nearly as annoying as push-polls. These are allegedly-neutral polls that are designed to push you toward one side and away from the other. They mostly are run by third-parties, not directly by the campaigns. So the R’s might run a “poll” with questions that go like “D candidate x might want to raise your taxes by 10%, 20%, or 35%. Which would you prefer?”… although that’s on the subtle side, and a lot of the push polling abandons all subtlety once you’ve answered a question or two, figuring you’ll stick around to the end once you’ve started.
(What’s really annoying to me is that push-polling shouldn’t work, but it obviously does or people wouldn’t spent time, effort, and dollars making them keep happening.)
Do not call, in addition to be limiting who can not call one (as mentioned non-profits, government, anyone you have previously done business with…) also only covers calls when someone is trying to sell you something.
In the beginning of do not call I would pick up the phone and tell them that we were on the list…. The answer would be “I am not calling to sell something. We just want to tell you about a wonderful opportunity.” or similar.
Comics I Don't Understand 
They don’t necessarily have to be sharing only one line (a wall-mounted landline from the look of it), he just doesn’t want to answer the phone that is ringing.
Well, to be fair, it IS from eight years ago, when landlines weren’t quite so quaint…
We have a landline (well kind of, it’s VOIP). Definitely nobody calls it that you would want to pick up and talk to.
Has pretty much everyone gotten rid of their landline? (We haven’t.) I expect most (not all) households to have separate cell phones for separate people, but didn’t think it was crazy unusual to have one shared landline.
I finally dropped my landline about a year ago.
But… there’s more than a bit of assumption involved in jumping from “they have a landline” to “the landline is the only phone anyone in the house has access to.”
We have only a landline. (My wife had a rarely-used flip phone, but it died a couple of months ago and she hasn’t gotten around to replacing it yet.) We have an answering machine on the landline, and don’t pick up until someone “real” starts to leave a message (all of our regular contacts know this, but of course there are occasional calls from doctor’s offices or such involving people who don’t).
Since we don’t pick up automatically, we can usually count on four to six hang-up calls a day, plus one or two robot scammers who do leave their scam messages on the machine. The number usually rises during political campaign season. (Oh, once or twice a week we also get a longish buzz from something that’s convined we’re a fax machine.)
I can certainly identify with the guy on the roof.
I have an old copper landline. AT&T is making noises about replacing it with fiber. I use Google Voice as my number a lot, as people who insist can text me at that number. The landline has an answering machine, so I never pick up unless I’m expecting a call. Most scammers don’t bother to leave messages.
I had the same landline number for 25 years, and during the first part of that, I was married so it was also on record as being a number where you could reach her. That turned out to be a problem, as she left behind a substantial number of bill collectors, none of whom would take my word for it that I was not her and that it was not possible to reach my ex-wife at my number.
They’d use an autodialer that would call up, once per day, and not detect that it was talking to an answering machine. They’d tell me how urgent it was that I call them back right away. Every six months or so, the debt would get sold to some other collector who’d try to collect my ex-wife’s debts from me. The reason I could tell is that the autodialer would have a new and different phone number that it was urgent that I call right away.
I also had a very stupid answering machine that wouldn’t let me delete a message until the entire message had been played. On the one hand, this was amazingly annoying. On the other hand, I sure as heck wasn’t going to go spend any money buying new answering machine technology.
Basically, I kept paying for that phone for years for one reason and one reason only… so I could call 911 if I ever had a reason to.
Another side effect of having the same phone number for so long was that I got onto every phone spam listing that ever existed. I got EVERY phone spam… the push polls (from both right and left-wing interest groups), the “Microsoft” tech support, the “Apple” tech support, the “oh no, I got arrested overseas, and I need bail money, which you can send by buying Amazon gift cards and emailing the codes to me”, and my favorite, the “an arrest warrant has been issued in your name” one, only they used a very old database and tried to hit me up for cash to keep my ex-wife from being arrested. The scammer was not amused when I failed to produce any money, and instead asked if I could watch the arrest.
Ah, frosteddonut is quite correct: I’d forgotten that we were in summer rerun season.
Speaking of which… am I misremembering, or was today’s Arlo and Janis a CIDU just last year?
There isn’t any indication that there is more than one phone.
Did you mean a geezer tag for landline, or for something else because…. i don’t get this one.
Woozy, I meant that it won’t be long before landlines would be a geezer reference.
We still have our land line, and it has an answering machine, and I screen all our calls because despite being on the do-not-call list, we get calls like Shrug does. I do give out the number, as I’m home nearly all day and my cell is not unlimited (but it only costs me about $100 a year). Plus, landlines are useful in emergencies, not just to call 911, but if the power goes down or there’s a serious catastrophe, cell towers will be jammed or not working, but copper lines still work fine – assuming you have an old-style phone with a cord, which we do, down in the basement where you need a flashlight to find it, but it still works.
just a visual play on an old saying. The Far Side was a master at them, like when the couple next door waltzes in like they own the place….I too have a land line and the same number for nearly 30 years. The cell service is right on the edge of coverage so I guess I need to move to a neighborhood with more bars.
“There isn’t any indication that there is more than one phone.”
Nor any indication that there isn’t.
We’re still in the landline camp here too. It is used primarily by those calling my wife for her many appointments and anything that is household related. We’ve had the number a long time and we both already have mobile phones with long established numbers. The bill has crept up, inexorably, year after year. I see I can now get VOIP service (keeping the same number) for less than a third of what I’m paying the phone company. I’ve resisted that so long because I know POTS lines work when everything else is down, but so far in my lifetime that has involved a few power outages. It’s really seeming to not seem worth it.
S. Bill… I switched my landline from copper to Verizon (later Frontier) FIOS. Their system design includes a battery so that you can still make calls in a general power outage.
On the other hand, Frontier kept billing me for six months after I sold the house it was connected to… and they billed me at the new address, to which they did not provide service. Despite repeated efforts to convince them that I wasn’t going to pay for the service they were no longer providing to me, they turned over bill to a collection agency.
I don’t think I’ll ever buy telecomm service from Frontier again.
But is a landline any different to the joke than digital phone service? You still have a phone in the house that rings.
The guy in this comic is literally above and beyond the phone call.
Whether his phone has a cord attached to it or not does not matter, nor does whether the family shares this phone.
Grawlix: If the family doesn’t share the phone it doesn’t make sense to hope that someone else will answer it.
I mean, yes, obviously the joke doesn’t make sense regardless, but it seems to me to be rooted in the idea of a shared phone.
Sorry – long.
Originally we had one phone line – 1979 copper wire. It was listed in my first initial, maiden name as Robert worked with children with emotional problems and this was cheaper than paying not to be listed, as well as friends and family, who of course knew my maiden name and that we were listed under same, could look up our number if they forgot it. We had an answering machine. Unfortunately the number we were assigned had belonged to a pediatrician and we had the number changed to the number we have now – which belonged to an attorney before it was ours, but much fewer calls for him and not panicked mothers. It was not until later that Domino’s pizza got a similar phone number and we started getting the wrong numbers for them, as well as for a optician shop and a TV repair shop – the latter closed and is now a phone number for a doctor, but it is the rarest of the 3 to get wrong numbers for and generally from hospitals or such and not patients.
When my dad became ill and I took over the practice and brought it home (as he had given notice on the office just before he became ill – so stored files went to parent’s house and current files came here) clients were given my home number to use. Unfortunately since it was my home number they would call me – on Sundays, when I was on vacation…. So we put in a second phone line and I gave clients that number to use, telling them that Robert did not always remember to give me messages and that was the extent of our phones for some time.
Husband was given a cell phone from/for work as he was director of the agency and on call 24/7/365. Later he convinced me to get a $10, pay by the minute cell phone so he could reach me if needed.
Then we decided he should quit his job and he did. Now, since he was not in one place all day, he wanted a cell phone, but he had turned his in when he left work. So we figured that if we got rid of the second (work) landline as I had much fewer clients, that would pay for his cell phone. We ended up taking a double plan as I had problems with changes with my cell phone co at that point and since then we have had one copper wire, landline and 2 cell phones (from an assortment of companies.
Then he started doing counseling online. One way that people could contact him was by phone – we did not want to give out our phone number, so he got a Magic Jack. He no longer does counseling by phone, but of course have kept the Magic Jack line.
Then Google offered him a Google number and he took it – it sends the call to our home landline,which has the advantage that we can give our that number to someone we hope to hear from once or rarely and block them if there is a problem, but the calls still come in at home.
We also got a Google number for our reenacting unit which used only have messages left at Google, but when there was an event it would be set to transfer the calls to my cell phone – the new unit Commander now has that phone number.
We also got a Google number for my embroidery chapter which only has messages left at Google.
Now when I need to make a call I stand there trying to figure out which phone/number to use! Well actually all calls are made on my cell phone (unlimited calls) so we don’t pay for the calls on the landline that is left as we have no minutes – it is basically for incoming calls – but toll free calls are made on that line and the fax machine uses it.
And yes, we still have the copper wire phone as worked straight through Hurricane Sandy and have had to argue to keep it. The backup batteries have limited life and having gone through 2 occasions about a year apart in which we had no electricity for just short of a week each time – beyond the backup battery life, we are staying with it until they pry it out of our hands. We call them when we drive past the connection box and the door to it is not only not locked, but open – and keep doing so until it locked and similar to make sure it keeps working.
Oh, and if we get 5 phone calls a day combined – almost everyone of them scam calls – it is a lot
James Pollock – my first cousin’s second wife was impressed by the neighborhood my mom lives in. (Not sure why, typical 1960s suburb.) So they bought a house up the street from my mom.
My cousin is now on his third wife. His second wife got to keep the house. While it has helped my mom when the kids were young as they would come and clean the snow at her house, his wife is in debt. My 89 year old mom gets threatening calls and letters for his wife as mom and she have the same last name and live on the same street.
My desk phone has an answering machine, and is “corded”. It functions as a telephone still when the power is out. If the power is out, I can go elsewhere. Then by calling the home number I can determine if the power is back on by whether the answering machine kicks in. I doubt I would bother with a FIOS setup if ATT gets rid of the copper.
” If the family doesn’t share the phone it doesn’t make sense to hope that someone else will answer it.”
And…
(It doesn’t make sense to crawl out on the roof to avoid answering a ringing phone, either.)
Folly, if you’re interested, look up NoMoRobo, it’s for VoIP lines. Incoming robocalls ring once, then are automagically vanished.
NoMoRobo is great; my cable company even includes it as a built-in option for their phone lines.
Nomorobo:
My milage varies: unless they’ve improved the call dumping so that it doesn’t even get as far as starting to ring, I’ve only ever had it dump one or two calls that I’ve noticed. I keep reporting numbers that get through, but I’ve recently started to despair, because the scammers just out and out fake the callerID, not just using unused numbers from a huge pool that they then quickly dump, but using actual real people’s numbers and callerID — unless they have access to some extra level of callerID, I don’t see any way to protect against this attack. If spammers now just regularly use a random real callerID that they can fake so I can’t tell (and presumably Nomorobo can’t tell), then I’m back to just not picking up any unknown number and being annoyed — Nomorobo can’t provide anything on top of that. (Plus, when I have guests from overseas, I never know what number they might be calling from, so I have to answer unknown calls anyway… Like I said, their blacklist has only ever stopped one or two calls that I’ve noticed…)
It is truly amazing what a sensible set of data privacy laws can do. German law forbids both robot calls and cold calling. If you aren’t already a customer, then they are not allowed to call you. This works not just in theory, but also in practice. I cannot remember the last time we got an (illegal) cold call from a German company.
There was a short period earlier this year when I received a number of spam calls on my mobile phone, but that was from a Swiss number. This was easy to defend against: I simply created a blacklist entry in the address book, and told the phone to refuse calls from that number. After that, they only made two or three more attempts.
For the most part, laws can only protect you from people who are willing to follow them.
At present, much of the phone spam originates in places that are far away, and it takes a smaller yield to make such calls profitable. I would expect that German companies can make more money by doing other things. In India, other opportunities for profitable enterprise are harder to come by.
It’s illegal here, as well, if you’re on the National Do Not Call Registry. That’s how I know that all the spam calls I get are from shady types. And unfortunately, it doesn’t cover calls from charities, pollsters, aldermen (there’s one on the north side who robocalls everybody in the city to ‘inform’ them of various things, all on the city’s dime) and other known ne’er-do-wells.
One of the more recent trends is callers (usually from India) claiming to represent the IRS telling you you have back taxes due and you have to pay right now or go to jail. They mostly end up catching old people who have disposable income and who are not as suspicious as they should be.
Caller ID (for us ordinary customers) is transmitted on the wire between the first and second ring, so the number can’t be identified until after the first ring. ANI or “automatic number identification” is something businesses can buy; the number comes in on a separate line. Technically, Caller ID is “in-band signalling” and ANI is “out-of-band signalling”.
“[Do not call] doesn’t cover calls from charities, pollsters, aldermen”
So far, all the politicians I called to be taken off their lists have complied. After all, they don’t want us to remember them as being annoying.
“So far, all the politicians I called to be taken off their lists have complied”
The point of being on the “Do Not Call” registry is that you don’t have to call people or organizations one-by-one to ask them not to call.
Calls from candidates aren’t nearly as annoying as push-polls. These are allegedly-neutral polls that are designed to push you toward one side and away from the other. They mostly are run by third-parties, not directly by the campaigns. So the R’s might run a “poll” with questions that go like “D candidate x might want to raise your taxes by 10%, 20%, or 35%. Which would you prefer?”… although that’s on the subtle side, and a lot of the push polling abandons all subtlety once you’ve answered a question or two, figuring you’ll stick around to the end once you’ve started.
(What’s really annoying to me is that push-polling shouldn’t work, but it obviously does or people wouldn’t spent time, effort, and dollars making them keep happening.)
Do not call, in addition to be limiting who can not call one (as mentioned non-profits, government, anyone you have previously done business with…) also only covers calls when someone is trying to sell you something.
In the beginning of do not call I would pick up the phone and tell them that we were on the list…. The answer would be “I am not calling to sell something. We just want to tell you about a wonderful opportunity.” or similar.