If you have a phone (who doesn’t),
you probably get phone spam, phone scam, telemarketing, wrong number collection calls,
and any number of other annoying unsolicited calls from people who should not be calling you.
You registered on that DO-NOT-CALL list, didn’t you?
You pay most of your bills on time, right? (righhht?)
WHY THE HECK ARE THEY BOTHERING YOU DURING IRON CHEF?!?!?
Whyyyyyyyyyyyyy?!?!??
Well, mostly because all of our numbers got sold by companies we do business with, who have less than decent ethics about that sort of thing. Privacy Notice? YEAH RIGHT! Well, other than changing your number and making it unlisted, or flat-out cancelling your phone bill, there’s not a whole lot we can do about it, short of a class action lawsuit.
Putting your justified rage aside for a moment, let’s assume that you just want to make the darn calls stop.
I don’t have a perfect solution for you, but I do have a little trick that might get rid of a good number of those calls.
It’s the ‘wrong number’ tone that you may be familiar with if you accidentally dial a disconnected number.
An auto-dialing computer will remove a “disconnected” number from its phone list if it hears the “wrong number” tone, and lucky you… these are the machines that most of these wonderful people use to harass us continuously.
So, here’s what you do:
Open that audio file you just downloaded and have it ready to play on your computer.
When a phone number comes up on your caller-id that you recognize as one of your phone-spammers,
pick up the phone before the 3rd ring and play the “wrong number” audio into the phone, several times in a row if you want, and then hang up.
If they ever call back, just play the “wrong number” tone again.
It won’t work every time, but it should cut down on the calls significantly.
This won’t solve the problem overnight. It could take weeks or longer until you see results.
One year the calls were so bad that I put the tone on the front end of my outgoing voicemail message.
That way, my voicemail did all the work for me when I wasn’t home, and when I was home, I could pick up the phone if I recognized the number, or let it go to voicemail if I didn’t.
The phone-spammer calls were almost completely eliminated. Of course, the one drawback to doing this is that some of your friends and family (and occasionally a legitimate creditor) think your phone number is disconnected if they don’t listen past the tone.
If you try it, please let me know and let me know how it worked out for you.
Some of you may have already stumbled on my recipes page over at EdHeller.com. For those who haven’t, you’re totally missing out on my mom’s banana cake recipe.
