The Sound of Silence

Technology is a wonderful thing! Little did Alexander Graham Bell realize when he invented the telephone that it would become an insidious pest in our lives. He did not envision the fact that a phone company would charge us outrageous prices for their service then turn around and list our phone number in a directory in addition to selling our phone numbers so that every telemarketer for miles around can call us. Nor did he envision the governing party aka CRTC above this phone company aka Bell Canada would set the ground rules that basically telemarketers can call you on the phone you pay for so basically at your expense from the hours of 8 AM to 9 PM basically 7 days per week. When the populus finally had enough to complain the CRTC set us this nice concept called the National Do Not Call List for you to add your phone number to. In essence this really became a Do Call List of which those numbers were harvested as anyone dumb enough (including us) who signed up quickly found out. If you add your name to this list the telemarketers have 31 days to purge your phone number from their system which in theory sounds fine but in practice gave them carte blanche 31 days to pester the snot out of you on a daily basis. To add insult to injury anyone you had dealt with in the past or as in Bell themselves have a current account or any charity was not governed under the new rulings so they could pester the snot out of you any time they wanted but sure shooting it was usually just as you sat down to eat.

Bell Canada offers this nice little service that you do have to pay for called call display. This allows you to see who is calling you which is great unless they choose not to identify themselves then the number comes up as long distance/long distance or private number. In reality this wouldn't be necessary if Bell did not put your name and phone number in a public directory then sell this information to telemarketers. Apparently they don't get the concept that I want communication services for those I want to communicate with not telemarketers, charities and other scammers. After the Do Not Call List major fiasco we took to only answering calls that identified themselves and we took advantage of another one of Bell's paid services called call block that allowed us to stop up to 12 calls from getting through. I turned off the answering machine portion of our phone allowing unidentified calls to ring until they gave up. The end result was not dealing with these calls but a lot of telephone ringing some days. Onto the scene came our new phone system, nice and shiny silver and white like a white knight and it has been a white knight.

This system has virtually all of the extras Bell offers built in with the exception of call display, the only service we must subscribe to through Bell but stripping our line of all the extras saved us $30 per month! Now the beauty of this system is with one click of a button all unidentified calls are automatically blocked. Period! The phone doesn't ring at all. Any call that comes in as a number only can be checked online then if desired saved to the call block list meaning if they call again the number rings once then is disconnected. The phone does log these attempts and what I've noticed is especially with one persistent telemarketer it went from 10 calls the first day to 4 the next day to 1 the next day and surprisingling a break of 2 weeks then one call and nothing since. We have effectively taken back our phone lines and I have to tell you the sound of silence is golden!

Garden Gnome
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