Do Not Call

Last Thursday, the day it was launched, I went to the new www.donotcall.gov.au website to sign us up for the new Do Not Call Register. The registration page opened, but the field into which the number to be added to the register should be typed was absent. Suspecting the site had some problem with Linux, I rebooted in Windows and tried again. Same problem. Gam suggested that the site may not work with Firefox, so I tried again with Internet Explorer. Same problem. I sent an email to the 'complaints' section regarding the problem but didn't hear back.

On Friday, the correct page loaded. I had trouble reading the word verification thingy several times, but in the end it worked. Then the confirmation page failed to load. A couple of hours later, I tried again. The confirmation page loaded, displaying a message that read something like:

An email has been sent to the email address you provided. The email contains a link that you must click to confirm your registration. If you do not perform this action within 7 days you will need to re-register through the Do Not Call Register website

The only problem with this was that no such email has arrived. I've been diligently checking both my inbox and my spam filter, to no avail. And I still haven't heard back from the complaints people either.

I've been waiting for years for this damn Do Not Call Register, and now it doesn't even work! I want Telstra to stop calling me with 'special offers'! I want no more holiday 'special offers'! I want no more of those calls with pre-recorded sales pitches... I want no more 'special offers' of free mobile phones from Indian call centres... and no more of those calls where an automated system phones at various times of the day to collect data on what times we're at home, then hangs up. Fuck the alleged 30000 jobs that might be lost; people own phones so that they can be in contact with people they choose to have contact with.

I'm always happy to sit around for 30 minutes answering research questions for surveys even when it means my dinner gets cold; I know the people doing them have quotas to fill, and they're usually students like me. The telemarketing people have quotas to fill too, but I don't have the money to help them out and I'm not interested in anything they have to sell; at least with the researchers I am actually interested in the results of various surveys. My charitable feelings do not extend to telemarketers, and for their bosses to bring out the violins all of a sudden, despite giving the poor sods such shitty job conditions, is just a massive hypocrisy.

Besides, lately I've been finding myself answering the phone at certain (telemarketer-frequent) times of the day with a very grumpy, wary "Hello?" only to find it's someone we know (like Gam's mother on one occasion!). The ratio of telemarketing calls to genuine calls that we receive probably stands at >10:1. We would average around 1 phonecall received per week on the landline from someone we know, as opposed to 2-3 calls per weekday from telemarketers.