Unsolicited phone calls

You were called at **** we do not have the caller's number to return the call.

Those words haunt me and the calls are driving me nuts. For years hubs and I followed a route that stopped unsolicited callers but that seemed to die a death. We are now paying for a service that blocks a caller AFTER he’s rung by inserting a special code. This means that he can never ring again. But we can’t stop people calling from overseas; this procedure doesn’t work for them and according to BT there is nothing they can do about it.

We never answer the phone around the six o’clock mark (evening) because it is invariably a foreign voice trying to sell something or maybe to talk about our computers. They ring at other times, of course. Today there was a ‘do not have the caller's number’ at 8.15am. I guess it’s a case of ‘if they won’t answer in the evening, we’ll get them in the morning’. We’ve got to the stage where we’d rather not answer the phone at all. Isn’t that awful? We’re now working on the theory that if someone rings and we don’t answer they will leave a message. Most times this works but there are folk out there who don’t like speaking to an answering service so they ring again, and again.

I suppose I should be grateful to the callers who operate an automatic dialing system because the majority of those don’t even speak when you answer. That was what happened at 8.15 this morning. Grrr!

You would think, wouldn’t you, that in a decade of advanced technology something could be done to protect our privacy. I have visions that at some future date even supermarkets will offer phone numbers and email addresses for sale. It all makes phone and voicemail hacking so much easier when there are no rules about selling data. Nothing is sacred anymore.

This is a worldwide problem, so why can’t the people of the world rise up and threaten those who seem reluctant to stop it?