On Sun, 22 Jul 2018 18:24:14 -0400, Nil
wrote:

On 22 Jul 2018, Ken Blake wrote in
alt.windows7.general:

I don't care what's legal and what's not. I don't want *any* calls
soliciting me for *anything*. That includes services I've done
business with before and charities and political calls.

If I want to do business with them again, make a donation or vote
for their candidate, I'll contact them.

They don't know this thing about you. Especially the charities and
politicians. They see *you* as just one of a huge number of sources of
funds, support and votes. In the main, calling "you" (calling people
in general) does them no good, they don't get any funds, support or
votes from us but they do from a small number and every vote, currency
unit or volunteer counts.
It's just like the criminals. They don't catch many with their
idiotic vanishing creams, dubious timeshares or Nigerian prince
needing a safe way to get his money out but they do get sufficient
numbers to cover the cost of all of those calls.
Bugging the **** out of you, personally, and me, personally, is a
small price to pay. We, as individuals were never going to help them
anyway so our levels of irkedness are moot.
It's the idiot sisters they are relying on and there are tens or
hundreds of millions of those.

It's like mass production. Economies of scale. Having sufficient
numbers of dumb, gullible but relatively cash-rich people to cheat to
make the effort of cheating them worthwhile.

You don't count. I don't count. Only the victims matter.

And there are millions of those untapped.


It may be an overreaction, but there's so much of this kind of
stuff going on these days that I almost don't want to have a
telephone anymore.

I need mine for the broadband.


Any of the legal callers are obligated to respect your request to put
you on their own Do Not Call list. That's about all you can do about
that. But in practice, I almost never get a "legal" commercial call. A
few political calls around election time. My town sometimes makes
emergency robo-calls. I used to get a very occasional call from a
charity I give to, but I asked them to stop and they did. Otherwise
nothing but junk calls. My solution for those is:

1) Rely on Nomorobo to block most of them;

2) Use my phone service's limited blocking feature to block the few
numbers that call repeatedly (I have a "3 strikes yer out" policy.) But
really, robocallers rarely re-use numbers. They know better.

3) don't bother to answer the phone unless it's a Caller ID I
recognize. If it's someone I know, they will leave a message.

I answer all calls if I'm awake, present and close enough to a
handset. It was trained into me and I can't shake it. Not that it's an
onerous task as I now get about one call every few years.



It's all a nuisance, but I manage to tolerate it.

I got a call from "Dave", today. He said he was representing an
insurance company who would give me lots of money if there had been an
accident in the last three years.
I mentioned that, with seven milliards of people on the planet there
must be accidents happening all of the time so this policy would cost
him a lot and would make me very wealthy.
"Dave" didn't seem to mind. He just kept spooling off his spiel.
"Dave" was a robot.
"Dave" was the only person-like thing to call me in months.

I have never been called by politicians or charities. Posibly because
I never leave my number where they can find it and I'm TPS registered.
Or possibly because they know I'm unlikely to help them and very
likely to try to sell them on some scheme to gentrify Jupiter with
Apollo era technologies.

J.