The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
Since I first got call display at my house, IÕve discovered that my home phone has a life all of its own. I was amazed the first few days when I arrived home and found the number of people that had called me during the day. No, thatÕs really not right. I was amazed when I got home to discover how many computers were calling my phone. Their numbers are always blacked out, or just say long distance, or say something like 123-456-789. But it seems like a game. My wife and I are both gone all day. That means that unless one of us is too sick to drag ourselves into work, our house is empty. So instead of telemarketers actually calling me, my phone instead gets a steady stream of calls from computers. What else is amazing is that these computers are now leaving me a lot of messages on my answering machine. Very few days go by where I donÕt come home from work and delete at least three or four of them. When I am home, IÕm hugely annoyed to pick up my phone to a long pause where I know a computer in some part of the world is spooling up to deliver a message; or worse yet, when I pick up the phone and get a recording that tells me to please hold for an Òimportant messageÓ from... whomever. The computer dials and then passes the call off to a real person when it is picked up. Can you tell IÕm annoyed by telemarketers? No, I wonÕt donate money over the phone to anyone. No, I wonÕt buy your insurance or your service. And most of all, I really, really donÕt want another credit card. For all of these reasons I was very happy last week when Canada got its first national Ôdo not callÕ phone registry. After long months of waiting, there is now a federal program in place where we can register our home, business, fax and cell numbers, placing them on a registry which companies need to follow or else be issued hefty fines. Canadians must have been anxiously waiting for this list to become active, because in the first six hours of its being open, over 220,000 people registered either online or by phone, swamping the entire service and crashing it for for seven or eight hours. Telemarketing has grown. In the past five or six years, as the cost of international telephone calls has fallen, many companies have contracted out their telemarketing services to nations such as India that have a huge population of highly educated citizens who speak quality English. In fact, many companies have completely outsourced this portion of their marketing arm, paying someone else to do it. These are usually fairly well paying jobs in many nations overseas, so they are in high demand. As well, it simply must work or why else would the calls keep coming? IÕm always wondering about this. Who takes calls from telemarketers and pays for their services? ItÕs like spam in your e-mail inbox. Who actually orders stuff from these companies? The Ôdo not callÕ list is not flawless and people have complained about some of the holes and exemptions. For example, newspapers trying to get you to subscribe can still call with no restrictions. Registered charities and political parties can still call as well. The biggest loophole is that any company you have done business with in the last 18 months are still free to call you. This is meant to be for things such as carpet cleaners who want to call about repeating a service, but people are concerned about what this exactly means. Are all of the companies youÕve bought clothes or even groceries from in the last year and a half now going to establish lists of people they need to call? Can these lists be sold or used by subsidiary companies? For example, if IÕve bought something from GM, can Chevy call me? While many companies are not happy about the list, a few of them telling Canadians they are now going to receive far more junk mail in their real mailboxes because of it, others are much happier, insisting that by giving people the opportunity to opt out, what you are really doing is leaving a list of people who may be more likely to actually buy something, cutting down on the number of calls they need to make. If you are interested in getting your name on the list, you can go to www.lnnte-dncl.gc.ca/ or call 1-866-580-3625 or 1-888-362-5889. ([email protected]) Tech Notes runs Mondays.
