Archives for 2007

What is with all the long distance telephone calls that I’ve been receiving in the last three months or so?

There are days when I get as many as 10 long distance or 1-800 number calls.

I’ve always been in the habit of not picking up the phone if I don’t recognize the number and uhm, well sometimes even when I do know who’s calling. For me, answering the phone depends upon what I’m doing at the time of the call, who’s calling and how I’m feeling. I often don’t feel well and it seems that many of the people I know are quite chatty on the phone and for me, there’s nothing worse than talking on the phone for an hour when I feel like roadkill.

When I do answer some of these long distance calls I’ve encountered people telling me I’ve won a prize, recorded automatic messages for anything from political parties calling about provincial election that took place yesterday (most of those were local calls actually) to companies trying to get me to buy things.

One of the most irritating callers was a company that told me that sometime in the past I had applied online to work for a company and they wanted to talk to me about how I could make money with them, but they needed my credit card number first. Huh? No I didn’t apply online to work with any companies lately and why on earth would you ever need my credit card number. When I started questioning the caller they’d hang up.

Out of the 100 or so calls they made to my home we answered maybe 4 of the calls and they hung up each time we questioned them or told them to take us off their call list.

They seem to have finally given up.

Still … I’m getting so many long distance calls from people who don’t bother to leave a message when they don’t get an answer that it’s becoming ridiculous.

When these companies do end up leaving a message it’s often on my cell phone as I leave our cell number in our home telephone message. Of course, we rarely use our cell phone so if someone is trying to reach us about something important it doesn’t make any sense to leave a message on our cell.

What’s worse is that if these people have called long distance and they leave a message if it’s legit and I want to call back they often only leave a true long distance number instead of a 1-800 number for me to call. No – unless it’s something vital I’m not spending money to call you back long distance during business hours. Leave a message, and leave a number that doesn’t cost me anything in order to return your call and just maybe I’ll call you back. Maybe.

Earlier today I answered a 1-800 call. I had an automated “secretary” inform me to wait on the line as they tried to connect me with the caller. The automated secretary tried three or four times and then told me they’d call me back another time when they could connect me with the caller.

Huh? If you are calling me you’d better be on the other end of the line when I pick up.

It would be nice if the automated secretary could have at least told me who was trying to call. I’ve found that sometimes when my bank or Visa has called in the past there’s sometimes a delay in the connection as if they were using some automated calling system. So I suppose that call could have been something official, but I still have no idea why they’d call.

It’s not like I’ve done anything to bring this on. I rarely leave my telephone number on anything online unless it’s with a company that I’m doing some work for, have partnered with or if it’s for something official like online banking or something similar. Plus, I always read the fine print in the terms of service or privacy pages on sites that I must give personal info on in order to register with and if I don’t like their terms I don’t register.

As of this moment I’m naming these kinds of nuisance long distance called telephone spam. Are you with me on this? Do you frequently get calls like this too?