RING!
You know, some days you just want to scream. If I had hair, I’d rip it out.
The National Do-Not-Call list is a really great idea. It’s such a great idea that 50 million Americans have already signed up for it and it’s not even active yet.
Then, a few days ago some pundit in Oklahoma goes to a judge on behalf of the “telemarketing industry” and gets him to state that the FTC did not have the authority to create such a list. Never mind that they waited until about a week before it was going to be active to do this. People have been adding their number to the list for months now.
So it went to the The Senate and the House of Representatives who (in an act of unashamed butt-saving) quickly made a legislative mandate that DID give the FTC the authority, and everyone breathed a sigh of relief.
But then U.S. District Judge Edward Nottingham (who is now permanently labeled in my book as a class A stinker) issued an opinion blocking the list based on telemarketers’ free speech rights.
Excuse me, what was that? Free speech?
Let’s me say it another way… Sheriff.. er, Judge Nottingham has ruled that someone I don’t know, and don’t want to know, regardless of whether my phone number is unlisted or not, and without knowing my name, has the right to bring their voice, at any time, into my locked home and interrupt whatever I am doing so that they can try to sell me something I don’t want anyway. And, they do not (and almost certainly will not) have to show their identity through caller ID so that I can choose whether to answer the phone. In fact, they can even use deceptive techniques, such as listing their caller ID as “Unknown” so that it matches pay phone calls. That way, I have to decide whether or not it’s better to never answer so marked calls and possibly leave poor Aunt Mae without help, who’s car happens to be broken down and is calling from a seriously scary Kwik-E-Mart pay-phone somewhere in East LA… I don’t think so.
It also allows them to use nifty little scams such as setting up a system that calls my house (completely randomly) and gets me up from the dinner table so that when I say the word, “hello”, it immediately hangs up and places my name on a list of confirmed numbers that they will call back at a later time to interrupt some other dinner. And knowing how the law works, they will probably use the “hello” call as a means of showing “a recent business relationship” exempting them from restriction.
But here’s the thing that truly chaps my hide.
It’s probably going to take months, if not years in court to get this all unknotted, and during that time all these telemarketers have this huge list of fifty-million names and numbers, which are obviously fully verified, just sitting there in front of them.
What do you think they’re going to do with that list? It’s not like anybody has said, “you better not call these people until we get this all worked out.” It’s a freakin’ gold mine for them. So much so, that it makes me wonder if it wasn’t all another huge scam.
I can see a bunch of greasy guys sitting in a cheap office someplace, asking themselves how they can legally get new numbers. One of them suddenly lights up and half jokingly says, “let’s make them think they’re signing up for a “do-not-call” list. At which time, the rest of the guys all look at each other with their mouths open. Two minutes later, half of them are on the phone with their lawyers.
And the best part of this scheme is that it gives them numbers that they might never have gotten otherwise, such as mine, which is “unlisted” and has “anonymous call rejection”. That last is the function that the phone company says makes it impossible for someone with an “unknown” caller ID tag to dial directly into your home. Of course, what they don’t tell you is that it freely let’s in pay-phones, out of state calls, and cellular calls. The phone company says that telemarketers can not list themselves as pay-phones to get through, but they’re full of it. Either their system is nearly transparent with holes, or there are hundreds upon hundreds of workers sitting out in front of Seven-Eleven’s going down a mysteriously targeted list of numbers at 30 cents a pop. Right.
But wait, there’s more!
As if to play on our sense of righteousness, the telemarketing industry states that millions could suddenly find themselves without jobs if the list was to go through, hell, it will probably effect the entire economy!
The “e” word is used pretty lightly these days, it seems.
And like the sap that I am, I had to waste my time and stop to think about this. WAS I being unfair? I mean, this is a HUGE industry, right?
But just look at that industry for a second. Here we have a business that makes money by interrupting you so that they can sell you something. More so, the “millions” of jobs they talk about are made up almost entirely of people who are minimally paid, without any benefits such as healthcare, fired or dismissed at a whim, and working for a company that goes out of it’s way to deceive you into picking up your phone. If they’re treating their potential customers with such brazen disregard, how well do you think they treat their employee’s?
As for stimulating the economy, this same industry is so hated by Americans that 50 million households (these are numbers, not individuals) have already said they want it to go away. At 2.5 persons per household, that works out to 125 million people represented before the list is even technically active. That’s nearly half the damn population!
The only other industry that even comes close to that disapproval level is the tobacco market, and nobody is crying over those lost jobs. The only ones making any real money in telemarketing, are the CEO’s at the top, you know, the greasy guys with the cheap offices.
But like it or not, we fell, hook, line and sinker for the possibility that we might eat our dinner uninterrupted. We never even considered that our own legal system would once again let us down, and we dared to believe that human nature is basically good and just. We were stupid.
For every brilliant bit of legislation that seeks to serve the good of the people, there will always be an equally brilliant lawyer ready to exploit that idea in the name of greed or personal politics. (more…)