Anyone got any inventive suggestions for dealing with telephone spam?
Of late, I've got several calls from some idiotic crew saying they've been instructed to ring people living in a council or ex-council house (it isn't and never has been); some f*cking recorded message extolling the delights of holidaying at Euro Disney; and 3-minute messages on the answerphone encouraging me to ring a premium rate number to enter a Sunday sweepstake in which everyone's a winner. Yeah, right. Needless-to-say, 1471ing produces a "number unknown".
I'm ex-directory and rarely give out my number so I don't know where they've got it from.
I've had a look of Ofcom's website but they seem like a toothless bunch. Apparently, spamming has to happen at least three times before they'll consider doing nothing (so if Ofcom presided over Nuremburg, you couldn't be charged with genocide unless you'd wiped out three distinct races --- or the same race three times?) and it's less serious to spam a "rugby club bar" than an "individual who is vulnerable as a result of their age" (in much the same way that it's less serious to sink a cleaver into the head of some brain-dead Ofcom moron than into the head of a decent upstanding citizen --- yeah, actually I can see that distinction now).
I looked at the Telephone Preference Service too but since they're a fully-funded front organisation of the direct marketing industry and their website's homepage contains the following bullsh*t...
"Before you apply however, you should be aware that registration may preclude you or your business from receiving information of value - thereby cutting you off from worthwhile business opportunities."
... I assume that handing them my number will mean they record the date when their parasitic members can legitimately bombard me with crap on the basis that my annual opt-out has expired.
I'd call my phone company except that Ofcom say it's nowt to do with them (no, it's probably *my* fault for having a phone) and, anyway, ntl's commitment to sense and decency can best be summarised by the following exchange I had with customer services after some drunken yob kicked in one of the junction boxes on a Saturday night:
ntl: We can't repair your phone line at the weekend, unless it's an emergency. me: What constitutes an emergency? ntl: If you were a minister of religion, for example, and you needed your phone because you might get an urgent call to give someone the last rites. me: But what happens if there's a gas explosion and I need to call the fire brigade to pull me from the wreckage of my home? ntl: That wouldn't constitute an emergency. me: Let me get this straight. You'd fix the phone line so that some superstitious paedophile could come round and mouth platitudes over my slowly cooling corpse but you wouldn't fix it so that the Fire Brigade could save my life before that became necessary? ntl: Well, we have to respect people's religion, don't we.
And while we're on the subject of spam, since throwing the junkmail from American Express and RBS Advanta in the bin every other week for the last ten years has not taught these chumps that I don't want their credit card, could I perhaps suggest to them that, in future, I will arrange for a waste-paper merchant to send a skip truck for each mailing and bill them for the cost rather than burdening the council's recycling service and loading the expense on to council tax payers? Didn't the last Tory government introduce a legal principle that the "polluter pays"?