Can anyone out there give me an impression of how effective the Do-Not-Call list is? That is, is there anyone out there that was getting a lot of telemarketing calls before it went into effect and also put his phone number on the list that can tell me if the number of calls he's receiving has diminished?

I'm thinking of getting rid of my PrivacyDirector service now that it should no longer be useful, especially since the government has required telemarketers to provide caller ID info.

Thanks.

Mine went away 100% except for political surveys and companies that I do business with (DirecTV called for some dumb offer). But the other calls are GONE and I love it.

Cool. How many were you getting before? Anyone else?

I used to hate weekends. I remember one Saturday I got ten calls. TEN! It got to the point I was answering the phone with "what do you want" in my nastiest voice. I would get at least 5 a weekend every weekend. I would get maybe one every other day on weekdays, just because I am at work most of the day. I would get one message a week on my answering machine from some stupid automated salesmachine that did not realize that it was not talking to a human. It drove me completely bonkers.

Since the list started, it has been blissful silence. I haven't gotten a junk call in 3 weeks, and only maybe 2 or 3 since it started. This is the best thing that the goverment has ever done for me. Word alone can not describe how much I love this. It brings tears to my eyes.

Same here. I was getting at least one call per evening, and sometimes several more during the day. Now the calls have pretty much completely stopped, aside from the ones you mentioned.

I didn't even think about it until I saw this thread but I don't get any sales call now and I used to get a ton especially ones for home improvements, lawn care services and credit cards.

If they could only stop my Inbox from getting SPAM....

Bitt, I was getting at least 2 a night. Now I've gotten 3 since it passed.

Ditto. If I was ever at home during the day, the phone would be ringing maybe once an hour with phone spam. I'd get home at night and there would be five pre-recorded spams on the answering machine. I did the national do-not-call list and it's all completely disappeared.

Now, my only problem is that my phone number is apparently one digit off from some kind of tax lawyer and/or collections service. I'm not really sure, but I'll regularly get phone messages from exasperated patrons offering to discuss their bills with me. Oddly, they all seem to call during the day when I'm not home.

hehe, you just reminded me of when I worked for a bike shop and our number was "1-800-PEDAL-IT". The phone company tried to talk the owner out of it, but he could not be swayed.... Ends up, it was a former phone sex number! 1-800-RED-?LIT!! And the number had been printed up in who knows how many Hustler mags! (And this was before the 'net really took off, like 1994 or so. Phone sex lines were busy). The worst was Saturday mornings... You'd answer the phone and you'd just hear breathing....

My number is one digit off from a restaurant. I've never gotten frustrated enough to take reservations but it was close for a while...

Ditto, though it wasn't as bad as everyone else -- I was only getting about one or two a week. Now it's just the Red Cross wanting me to give them more blood.

Save your money Bitt!

DNC is one of those rareties - something set up by the Govt that works much better than expected. We went from a dozen plus calls a week to one in a blue moon.

We have a similar setup in the UK but it's never had any big advertising apart from the telephone directories and mentions in the newspaper etc.

My gran wasn't on it but after she was complaining about getting several phone calls every evening I signed her up to it and she said she will maybe get one call every other weekend and as soon as she mentions "telephone preferen...." they hang straight up!

I keep telling her to get the name of the company first so that she can report them but no luck.

They do a junk mail version too (Mailing Preference Service) and that cut back the crap she gets posted a huge amount. It's administered by the UK DMA but seems to be very reputable.

Gareth

Heh.. My old number was one off from an Equipment Rental place.

Yeah, we took reservations.

Me.

Dump the privacy detector. Don't need it anymore.

I work in the industry (okay. NOW everyone hates me..) not doing the actual calls, my company MAKES the dialers that dial on 300+ lines for gawd knows how many folks.

The DNC thing works, if you haven't signed up, do so. Some things to watch out for, however:

1. You'll still get calls from people you did business with up to 18 months afterward.
2. Be wary of filling out any Sweepstakes, or any giveaway. They are now putting clauses in there saying that by entering, you forfeit your DNC status, and will be called by them (or whomever is calling for them and any subsidaries.)
3. If you get called, make sure the company's calling you is in the US before being a jerk and threatening them. While many centers are in the US here, many companies have centers in Canada doing the calling. They're exempt. As is anyone from outside the US. (What's sad, that noone ever thought of, is people losing their jobs because companies are moving their said 500+ centers TO Canada and Mexico.)
4. Non Profits are exempt as well..
5. If you do get called, from a company in the US, don't go off on them. The person calling you has NO FRIGGIN' CLUE. Just ask to speak to the manager, and THEN go off on them.

As for the caller ID, it's stil in the works, since different LEC (Local Exchange Carriers, i.e. Bellsouth) never really set a standard for transmitting Caller ID info. So as of last Thursday, everything went to hell. (For example, found out that PacBell's system was locking up Bellsouth's system when all the CallerID stuff started going thru, because of a mismatched bit in the protocol.)

Ah, fun stuff. Reminds me of work.

Hey, wait.
Me.

3. If you get called, make sure the company's calling you is in the US before being a jerk and threatening them. While many centers are in the US here, many companies have centers in Canada doing the calling. They're exempt. As is anyone from outside the US.

IIRC, there was a court decision not too long ago that US companies contracting their call centers to firms outside the US are still required to abide by the DNC list, since the company being advertised for is still a US company. Can't find a google link, though.

I haven't had ANY telemarketer calls in a long time...

oh wait, that's because I only have a cell phone.

...mmmmm...brain tumors...

As it happens we ignore our landline and only use our cells, but the landline doesn't ring anymore anyway.

I wonder if the ringer is even on.

As it happens we ignore our landline and only use our cells

I wonder how prevalent this is these days. The only reason that we've got a landline is 'cos you need one to get DSL. I very rarely make or receive any calls on it. It can be quite useful when you've left your mobile somewhere else in the flat and can't find it -- how else are you going to phone it to make it ring?

I still use my landline a lot. Much more so than my mobile. Mainly because it's a lot cheaper. Calling for one hour landline to landline costs about 1.5 euros here. Calling for one hour on my mobile easily costs about 10 times as much. (there are also subscriptions that are cheaper, but the subscription fee is A LOT higher too then)
Calling landline to mobile is a bit cheaper than mobile to mobile, but since a lot of my contacts only have a mobile phone these days, the cost of calling mobile phones is easily 80% of the landline bill, while it's not even 20% of the calling time.
I mainly use my mobile for texting and to be reachable, not for calling itself.

Don't have a house phone, myself.After the house went up, BellSouth never offered DSL like they said they were, so my roomie and I droped it. We have cable 'net, and if we lose a cel, we use the other to call it.
Me.

I've got a landline for ADSL and the few companies that require a landline number instead of a mobile. I use my mobile for everything else though.

I can't get DSL. Too far, and Verizon is too cheap to drop the $6k piece of equipment in their vault so we'd be close enough.

I have 2 other cell phones on my plan, my wife's and my Treo (a.k.a. the portable internet source) so it's not much of a challenge finding *a* phone.

My former Employer's number is 800-FOOD-NOW which is also the same number as 800-DO-ME-NOW apparently. Lots of disappointed callers.

I wonder how prevalent this is these days. The only reason that we've got a landline is 'cos you need one to get DSL.

Qwest (formally US West back then) botched the rollout of DSL for the most part. You still can't get anything much above 640k down without paying a fortune. So most people around here went other routes, such as wireless or cable. My new house doesn't even connect to a landline, though I suppose I should order one month of phone service just so Qwest puts down the wire before I landscape the back yard.

I very rarely make or receive any calls on it. It can be quite useful when you've left your mobile somewhere else in the flat and can't find it -- how else are you going to phone it to make it ring?

I've lost mine a few times over the years, and have found it again by sending it e-mail to the SMS gateway address, if I didn't have someone elses cell phone handy.

You still can't get anything much above 640k down without paying a fortune.

Extra downstream bandwidth isn't too pricey here (an extra £10/month takes you from 512Kbps to 1Mbps), but it's not accompanied by an increase in upstream bandwidth (it's 256Kbps for both), and BT aren't offering SDSL wholesale yet.

BT aren't offering SDSL wholesale yet

That isn't quite true, they are offering it but it is very expensive and available only on a limited set of exchanges.

With an undertstanding ISP ( http://www.aaisp.net/multiline.html ) and a load balencing router at each end it is far cheaper to get 4 512/256 ADSL lines (resulting in 2048/1024) than to get a single 1024/1024 SDSL line.

I remember one Saturday I got ten calls

I have little sympathy for somebody who actually answers telephone calls, particularly on a Saturday morning.



I can't even remember the last time I picked up my telephone before the answering machine had let me know who was calling. My rule of thumb for a ringing telephone is, "Is there anybody I want to talk to more than whatever I am doing right now?" and the answer is inevitably NO.

tanstaafl.

my phone number is apparently one digit off from some kind of tax lawyer and/or collections service.

I used to have a phone number that was the same as the local newspaper except for the prefix; and also the same as the local hospital except for the prefix.

Talk about a lot of wrong numbers...

tanstaafl.

Don't you find the telephone ringing annoying? It wakes you up if you're asleep or you have to pause what you're doing in order to listen to the machine to screen. Wouldn't it be nice to go back to the days where if the phone rang, you could be reasonably assured it was someone you wanted to talk to? Sure, you can still screen if you're doing something important, but you don't have to do it every time.

Don't you find the telephone ringing annoying?

For a number of years, we kept the ringer off on our phone. The only notification we had of a phone call was the quiet click of the answering machine. If someone thought their call was important enough to leave a message, we would eventually hear their voice.

In the last couple of years, we've got a new phone number which for some reason doesn't get many sales calls, and our friends only call us at home if it's important. So we've been able to leave the ringer on these days and still have peace.

I still can't get over the DSL gouging in the UK. I just swapped provider in Hong Kong. I now have 3Mb/512k for GBP 16 / month on a 3 month contract. If I'd wanted to sign for 12 months or longer I could have probably got down to a tenner or so. And in Japan I can have 100 Mb fiber-to-the-door for less than GBP 50 /month.

On the other hand, I can't get fresh Jaffa cakes in either place.

Regards

Mark

My rule of thumb for a ringing telephone is, "Is there anybody I want to talk to more than whatever I am doing right now?" and the answer is inevitably NO.

This has been an interesting benefit of going cell phone only. If I have it on me, it is in silent mode since I will feel the vibration. I can easily and quickly take it out of my pocket, look at the caller ID, and decide if I want to answer. If not, I hit a reject call button, and they leave me a message that I can listen to at my leisure. Or, if I know for certain I don't want any calls, I have the power button. Turn it back on later, and if it tells me I have new messages, I can listen to them then.

Bah. You think that's bad? When I lived in Alberta (back when we still had rotary phones), my family had a phone number of 320-9876. It was a magnet for crank-calls.

My previous phone number was 333-6699. All those buttons are near the right side of the phone, so little kids playing with the phone could reach them. 2 or 3 times a week I'd get a call from a 2 year old playing with the phone. At first I was irritated, but then I found it kind of amusing.

me: "hello"
<silence>
<giggling>
me: "are you playing with the phone?"
<pause>"yeah."
me: "how old are you?"
kid: "3".

Pretty funny.

Supposedly Steve Wozniak once got the toll-free phone number 888-888-8888 but gave it up when he got more ... prank (?) ... phone calls than he could handle, supposedly mostly from kids playing with the phone.

We (in my company's Tech Support) will occasionally get calls from dialer owners. The call goes something like:

"Can you help me? I want my dialer to dial one number on every line until it gets through."
"Yes, we can help. It's usually not standard operating procedure to call one number over and over, however."
"Well, see, there's this concert in town, and we can't get thru to tickmaster/ticket office." or "The world series is coming up, and my office would like tickets."

So, we'll get them set up to dial 800-xxx-xxxx on 320 lines, all at once, until their one agent, waiting for the call to get thru, will.

It don't happen that often, but sometimes it's amusing. They're using their $40k machine to hammer away to get $8 tickets. ($20 if going thru Ticketmaster.)

Me.

So, we'll get them set up to dial 800-xxx-xxxx on 320 lines, all at once

When I was working in the telecom industry, I did some work on a predictive dialer system. One of the more amusing bugs (thankfully we spotted it before the code was released) was this:

1. The dialer software would run through a database table of 'prospects' and dial each one.
2. If the software was configured to add a prefix for an outside line, it would add this before dialing.
3. If the call wasn't answered, the number would get put in a different table in the database (subject to expiry time, number of attempts, etc.). This would include the prefix.
4. The call would later be retried from the second table, and the prefix would be added again. If it failed again, back it went, including the (now doubled) prefix.

When you consider that most offices in the UK use '9' for an outside line prefix, we were lucky to notice while it was still on our test system, otherwise we'd have been generating about 5000 calls/hour to the emergency services...

999 being the emergency service number? That seems like it'd get a lot of false calls from kids, cats, etc.

Might be a holdover from the days of rotary dialling, where the nine would be the number requiring the full turn of the dial, or almost full turn, depending on where the 0 is placed - first or last.

Here in Sweden we used 90000 (now switched over to Euro standard 112), with the 9 requiring the full turn and the 0s for speed (as it was placed first on the dial).

/Michael

999 being the emergency service number?

Yeah. Although you can dial the European-style 112 number now, too, I think.

Ah. In the US, we didn't have special numbers until well after touch-tone had taken hold.

Homer: Operator, give me the number for 911!

http://www.fire.org.uk/advice/999history.htm

Ooh. We've actually had clients DO this..

They call up, confused because they got a bill from the local 911 provider for making 1000+ calls to 911.

(Seems that the manager who set up their system was under the impression that they had to hit '9' to get an outside line. Like their PBX. Add that to the 1 country code, and mis-loading a WHOLE BUNCH of exchanges gave them a calling list of 32k+ "911..." numbers.) Oops. It actually did cause us to implement a small check. if the first three digits (even for, say, a valid number) turns out to be 911, then dump the number...

Me.

They call up, confused because they got a bill from the local 911 provider for making 1000+ calls to 911.

You have to pay to call emergency services?! Or only if it's a mistake?

Only if it is a mistake. In this case, since it was an autodialer business doing it, I am guessing it was more of a fine than a useage bill.

FWIW, even lines that don't have active service can call 911.

Only if it is a mistake. In this case, since it was an autodialer business doing it, I am guessing it was more of a fine than a useage bill.

Yeah, sorry if I gave the other impression. They got fined since they effectively locked up the 911 call center for 10+ minutes. It was a fine per call since none of the calls were actual emergencies. (I am unclear as to the exact nature of the bill, unfortunately.)

I will add that we once had a dialer shut down an entire town, too. Somewhere out in mid-Texas (US), a company started up with 4 T1s (24 lines each). they hired all the local kids from the area, and trained them. The first day they went live, the activity from the predictive dialer sucked all the computing power away from the other lines in the town, so other businesses/residential phones were inactive. (i.e. Pick it up, no dial tone. Or dial tone after 10 seconds.) They were told to shut down until the local carrier could upgrade the town's CO so it could handle all the traffic. Took 'em a year. Quite amusing on our side, as we (in tech support) made our company's first slogan: "Predictive Dialers - Your town doesn't need those phones!".

Me