They're BAAaack...

We've been on the national Do Not Call Registry for a few years now...it's been great, no more telemarketers, only the occasional survey and whatnot. Well last month Zach filed for his DBA (do business as) for his painting/landscaping business. Since he doesn't have his own cell phone (yet) he listed our home telephone number on the papers. So now we're getting the telemarketing calls again. About a dozen a day.

I've got it nailed down to approximately 8-10 in the morning and then the mid-afternoon. That's when they call. And that's when I don't answer the phone. If you call here and you get the machine, leave a message because chances are I'm just standing there waiting to hear the click so I can get all angry about another one of the calls.

I recently got a forward from someone saying that those calls you get where you hear the click as soon as you answer is a machine calling your house and tracking the times of day that your household answers the phone. This way they can have an actual human call back at the most likely times of day for a person to answer your phone. I didn't believe it at first because I always thought that they just dialed a bunch of people at the same time and then whoever answered first was the lucky winner of the telemarketing call and the other people just got hung up on. The forward is starting to make sense now though since they are calling at the same time of day.

Do you know how freaking frustrating it is to be 8 months pregnant and fat, just having settled on the couch for the first time all day, then the phone rings? You have to jump up fast (not an easy feat at this stage in the game), run around the house looking for the cordless phone which you can never find anymore because your house goes in a circle since the addition last year, then you finally grab it at the last ring, breathlessly answer the phone, only to hear a "click." AHHHHHHH!! I want to scream. And I usually do. It feels like such a violation of your freedom. It feels like I'm in the book 1984 and Big Brother is playing tricks on me or something. These calls piss me off because there you are, anger raging through your blood stream and there is no one to unleash it on.

The only kind of calls that are possibly more frustrating than the auto hang-up ones, are the ones where a human actually speaks back. They ask for Zach like he's their buddy, I question them, they ask for him again, I question again, and then realizing they're not going to get anywhere with you, THEY hang up on you! HOW DARE THEY!! I'm the one who is supposed to hang up on them. This is worse than the auto hang-ups because now you have the knowledge that there is a human out there who cares so little about the fact that you are pregnant and tired and that it causes you physical pain to get up and answer the phone, that they feel they can just hang up on you when you are no longer useful to them. There's no where you put your anger when they hang up on you.

These calls are particularly offensive and frustrating because we are on the do not call registry. It's not my name that's on the registry, it's our phone number. So it doesn't matter that Zach just added a business to our number, they shouldn't be calling anyway. These people are supposed to get fined if they call a number that is on the registry. Now it is my personal mission to get each and every one of them fined for their indiscretion. They call and I ask for the company name or the phone number and I am supposed to (by law) be able to get a damn answer out of them so I can call the Do Not Call Registry and report their asses. But then they hang up on you before you can get an answer. Or they hang up when you ask them for the name of their company. NO! That is not the way it is supposed to work. I'm going crazy trying to get these numbers. I really, truly am going to go mad.

So out of self-preservation I am screening calls. But there's still all that anger...what to do with it? Erg. Gee, can you tell I must be in a particular phase of pregnancy-induced hormonal rage?