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All sorts of pests intrude upon your life these days. Most mornings, your mail consists of charity solicitations, magazine subscription offers, RV lot promotions and sweepstakes entries. When the doorbell rings, more often than not you find an evangelist or encyclopedia salesman on your porch.
The telephone, too, has been a traditional tool of such nuisances -- it's an old joke about how you clamber from the tub to answer the phone, only to discover that someone is selling dance lessons.
But that was in the old days before modern high-tech
telemarketing, when there really was a living, breathing
someone
on the other end of the line, working
through the local directory.
Getting an unlisted number won't help now, because those automatic dialing machines will step through every possible number in an exchange.
Another old trick, keeping a police whistle at hand and blowing it into the mouthpiece just as the spiel begins, won't work either. The fabricated machine voice on the other end doesn't seem to notice any repulsive sounds you might transmit.
Even if you just hang up, the other phone won't disconnect until the message is delivered. Thus your telephone service, something you pay for every month, is being occupied by an obnoxious and uninvited freeloader. It's as if the law allowed door-to-door salesmen to stay for dinner at your expense whenever they felt like it.
Something clearly needs to be done. Certainly we could
lobby congress to pass a law against unsolicited
telemarketing, which might solve the junk fax
problem too.
But our representatives would feel compelled to write a law that is acceptable to their PAC contributors and honorarium payers, rather than a law that helped their constituents. The result -- you'd break the law if you called the friend of a friend because you heard he was looking for a used lawnmower like one you had sitting around, while the automated aluminum-siding voice would somehow be quite legal. Things just work that way in our great republic.
There are several ways to fight technology with technology. Your trusty answering machine can intercept a lot of these calls, with the added benefit that the robot voice usually doesn't wait for the beep, so you miss part of the spiel when you play back your messages.
Further, we must realize that those auto-dialing and auto-speaking things on the other end are just computers. They must be able to sense certain frequencies on the phone line to identify dial tones, ring signals, busy signals, etc. That means it is theoretically possible to control their actions from a remote telephone.
Some clever hacker, perhaps a veteran of the old blue
box and Cap'n Crunch days of phone phreaking,
should
be able to figure out the control sequences for
telemarketing machines, and then sell a little box you
attach to your home phone. Punch the button, the proper
tones go out, and that distant monster responds by crashing
with its memory so scrambled that the systems engineers
need several months to restore it.
But it really isn't fair to take it out on the machine, which just does what it's told. If we're serious about eliminating this menace, we need to go after the people behind the machine.
Here is how newspapers can perform a valuable public service. Whenever the telemarketers start preying on a town, the local gazette will unleash its crack investigative reporters. The next morning, the front page will list the home and private-office telephone numbers of the principal officers of the offending company. We can take it from there -- if it's fair for them to bother us at home or work, then it's fair for us to do it to them. Especially late at night and early in the morning, when the rates are low.
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