When enjoying some family time at home, nothing used to irritate me more than those #&$!@ telemarketers. At dinner time, or while sitting on the couch reading a book with the kids, the phone would ring, you’d get up to answer it, and you’re now listening to a push sales pitch that you cannot politely turn off.

I’m pretty sure this isn’t why the telephone was invented, but those filthy marketers are going to annoy us from here to eternity. Hey it sounds like I’m going to bash the telephone as an intrusive technology, right? Well, no I’m not. I want to point out some perfectly good technological solutions to help you manage the telephone better. It doesn’t have to affect your family in negative ways.

Do Not Call

First of all, walk… No… RUN over to https://www.donotcall.gov/ with your browser of choice, and be sure to register your phone numbers with them. I did this with my number a few years ago, and it significantly reduced the number of calls. It takes a couple of months to kick in, but when it did, the flood became more of a trickle.

Caller ID
In my opinion… worth the extra monthly charge to have this service. Have an answering machine too though. If a call comes in and the display reads UNAVAILABLE or ANONYMOUS, just let it go to the answering machine. If it’s somebody you know, they’ll leave a message, and you can always pick up then and make an excuse like, “I was outside and couldn’t get to the phone in time,” or just be honest and tell them the truth. Tell them about the federal do-not-call list while you’re at it.

Talking Telephones

Recently somebody left our portable phone outside in the rain. Pretty much did it in. So I went to Costco and found these Panasonic telephones that actually speak the caller id information. I think it’s the greatest thing! Now when I’m sitting down at the dinner table, on the couch, or taking care of business on the throne, I can actually just wait until after the 2nd ring, and hear whether or not I need to get the call. When I hear “Call from Unavailable”, I know that I can simply ignore it. No more interrupting my reading time with the kids to get up to see who it is that’s calling.

Actually these talking phones have actually improved the efficiency of getting the phone calls routed to the right person without extra people involved. Since they caller id is announced, none of us actually move until we hear who it is, and most of the time, once we have that information, three out of the four of us know that “it’s not for me”, and the person who it is for can make the dash to answer it.

Tomorrow, I’ll talk about the non-technical solutions to the problem.

UPDATE: trendyblog points out that I missed a helpful technology in the form of the TeleZapper. Rather than repeat it here, click on the link at the start of this sentence and go read it on trendyblog. I’m not familiar with it myself.