<p>The IO7 does have the i and allow the option to block whatever recent caller you select. Thanks–will consider this. Fortunately, so far the telemarketers don’t seem to be calling either of my cell phones. Yea!</p>
<p>You all need to upgrade to ios7 to get the block feature.</p>
<p>Ahah! That may be enough to make me an ios7 convert. Will do it when I am back home.</p>
<p>That said, I figured out how to take a screenshot photo on my phone. I was happy about this find.</p>
<p>I answer the phone so it won’t go to voicemail and I need to deal with it later. I will hang up on any recording. I will interrupt a person to ask if they are soliciting anything (a man came to our door and acted like this question had to do with sex recently- we supposedly have no soliciting allowed in our area), some don’t understand asking for something IS soliciting. I will hang up after telling them NOT to call again.</p>
<p>Robo calls are far too easy now. We keep a landline, retired and dropped our cell contract in favor of pay per use for our few needs (we have laptops/tablets to surf with away from home and car gps as well). Leave cell phones off at home. We have phones in many rooms and I refuse to carry a cell phone on my person to be able to answer it wherever I am.</p>
<p>I’ve told this story on cc before, but it brings a ole to my face, in a weird sort of way. Whenever a telemarketer called our house (when I was growing up) my mother would tell them we were having a funeral service. That usually got them off the phone quickly. The, when myom passwd away several years back and we were sitting Shiva and about to start the service, the phone rang … Yup a marketing call. I took it as a sign from my mom, and sait the requisite response. Miss ya, mom.</p>
<p>Me: Sorry, I can’t help you. (click)</p>
<p>That takes approximately 2 seconds. Anything longer and you are wasting your own time, no excuse. Drives me nuts when I hear my wife take a good 30 seconds or more to extricate herself from a telemarketer.</p>
<p>Ack phone typos. Sorry. The memory of my mom’s line and what happened when she passed away brings a *smile to my face. The rest of the typos are hopefully decipherable.</p>
<p>Tom Mabe is a comedian who has some funny clips regarding dealing with telemarketers. I encourage you to go to youtube…</p>
<p>When we were having very aggressive and persistent Scientology calls, we started asking them for the name and address of the supervisor so we could serve the harassment complaint. Also asked to speak to supervisor. They hung up pretty quickly. They have finally stopped calling again recently. Phew!</p>
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There are other ways to pay the bills than to work for telemarketers that consistently break the law by calling numbers that on the Do Not Call Registry. And don’t doubt that the employees know exactly what is going on–they always hang up like a shot as soon as you say the words Do Not Call. If your number is on the registry and the call is commercial in nature, you don’t owe the telemarketer an iota of courtesy.</p>
<p>I agree that folks who are trying to sell ANYTHING are breaking the Do Not Call federal law (which sadly is NOT enforced). The huge loophole in the law is charities and political calls, which ARE allowed. </p>
<p>I have no compunction about ignoring the calls or saying, “I’m not interested,” and hanging up immediately. I have no sympathy for folks who choose to become telemarketers, especially if they know that people will hang up on them and remind them that they are violating the law. Talking to them when I have no intention of purchasing anything they offer is a waste of my time and energy as well as theirs.</p>
<p>I usually pick up an obvious telemarketing call, because if I don’t, they call back every night until I do. Depending on my mood, I either say “No thanks” and hang up before they start their spiel, or else I say, “I never buy anything from an unsolicited marketing call. Feel free to mail me some literature.” They invariably say, “We can’t do that.” Me: “Sorry.” [click]</p>
<p>Then there’s the Seinfeld approach:</p>
<p>Jerry: Oh, gee, I can’t talk right now. Why don’t you give me your home number and I’ll call you later.
Telemarketer: Uh, I’m sorry we’re not allowed to do that.
Jerry: Oh, I guess you don’t want people calling you at home.
Telemarketer: No.
Jerry: Well, now you know how I feel. [hangs up]</p>
<p>My dad was really bad about telemarketers. He just felt it was impolite to hang up on them, so he’d listen to their whole pitch. He also apparently thought it was impolite to say No; I once discovered that his U.S News subscription was paid 8 years into the future!</p>
<p>I remember that Seinfeld episode. That was classic.</p>
<p>I had an internship in college for a political organization, and part of that internship was doing calls. I had a list of 100 or so people I had to call in a sitting and a script to read. I was told the only people on my list were people who had agreed to accept communications from us via the politican’s website. If someone hung up, yelled at me, or asked not to be called again I had a button in the system to push to remove them from our database so they would not be called again unless they agreed on the website again… I never saw one of those names again.</p>
<p>I love, love, looooooved getting hung up on. In 100 calls I’d get maybe 10-20 people who actually wanted to talk about what I was supposed to talk about, and then the majority of the rest were hang ups. Then there were the angry people, some would just yell, others would want to argue with me or belittle me. I wished they’d just hang up. I needed the internship. I eventually quit because the anxiety of doing the calls was making me physically ill, and they refused to give me the job reference I’d done the internship for in the first place because I only completed 95% of the internship.</p>
<p>I am getting several calls daily from a few different numbers. I just never answer them. I google them and the numbers are discussed on all sorts of webpages and everybody always says its a computer and there is nobody on the other line, so I don’t bother. It drives me nuts. But if I accidentally answered and got a person, I would just say “no thank you” and hang up. </p>
<p>One thing that was interesting about the calls I did was that for a large portion of the time, I was not really calling to talk about my particular candidate, I was just supposed to ask if they knew their polling location and if they had a way to get to the polls-- lots of seniors who couldn’t drive and needed advice about getting absentee ballots or similar situations. I’d still get a 20 minute tirade about how much whichever party sucks-- half the time they didn’t even recognize my organization’s name to know if they were for or against me anyway-- and they were wasting their breath because I wasn’t trying to convince them to vote one way or the other anyway. And I wasn’t allowed to hang up on them. It was the world’s dumbest job.</p>
<p>for those who think telemarketers should be excused because they are “just doing their job” when doing so is breaking the law, I remind them that thieves and arsonists are just doing their job, too.</p>
<p>While I am no fan of telemarketers, I doubt the people making the calls know who is or is not on a do not call list, and marketing calls are not in and of themselves illegal.</p>
<p>I, too, hate the one with the cruise ship horn. It is so annoyingly loud. I am also tired of the ones that say this is my final notice. If only! Thank goodness for caller ID. I also never answer my cell if it is a number I don’t recognize. If it someone I know, they’ll leave a message. I do feel like these calls have increased this lasts year.</p>
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<p>This is what I do at least three times a week, when I get calls from the “We’ll have a donation truck in your area on X date” people. And then I curse the one time I actually gave them a couple of boxes of stuff when I was cleaning closets.</p>
<p>I have a related gripe–calls from charities that I do support (like a college), and that press me to pay my gift with a credit card over the phone. I’ve sworn that the next time somebody does that, I’m going to retract the pledge I just made.</p>