I'm sure you've all heard enough about the FTC's No Call List... Me?... I signed up for that list the day I found out I could... That was about 10 hours after they opened up their web site to take applications... I am a BIG propunent of this idea... a) I get a ton of telemarketing faxes at home that I don't want... It got to the point, that I simply turned off the fax machine... That pisses me off... They cost me money in paper, ink, and now I have to plan when I may need to get a fax at home to turn it back on... b) My voice line is a cell phone... I dropped land line service in my house ages ago for voice, mostly because it was cheaper for the cell, and I'm seldomly home to get a call... I don't need those idiots calling me, burning up my minutes, trying to sell me vinyl siding since I live in an apartment complex... (sometimes I invite them out to give me a quote on the entire complex... I always get a kick out of the return phone call...) c) My phone lines at work are just that... They are there for my clients... They are not installed so some ass can call me to offer me a free vacation if I will only go look at their wonderfull time share opportunity... We do work that is inconvienient to stop in the middle of sometimes, but we always find a way to get to the phone, because we're a service driven company... You don't answer it, and they'll call someone else... I get 10 - 15 calls a day from idiots trying to sell me something... Screw them...
Now... The courts decided that the FTC needed a legislative mandate to go through with the DNC registry... So in one of those rare moments in time when politicians act quickly and act together on something, the house and senete slammed through the mandate, and sent it up to the president... Outstanding!!! (I'm halfway curious who the 5 votes against the bill came from in the House... but I'm too lazy to go look it up... they must really be kooks...)
Well now another court has decided that the FTC is overstepping its bounds because they would be impacting the telemarketers' freedom of speech... I somehow, (and hey, I could be wrong... but I just doubt it) just don't think that the first amendment was written with this spirit... Hell I took the time to go read the actual text of the amendment... I don't see anything in there saying that I would be forced to listen to someone's freedom to speech... Where does this come from?... If the telemarketers want to stand on the corner, and shout at the world, fine... If they want to call people that are willing to listen to them, fine... Why are those of us that don't want to get these damn calls being forced by the judicial branch of the government to have to receive them?... Somebody, please explain to me, why the hell the telemarketers even want to call people like me?... I would think that they would actually benefit from the idea since it would narrow down the field of numbers they would be calling... It would simply remove the people that don't listen, and hang up... or the people like me that will lead them on and on, doing everything I can to mock them, and run up their phone bill... This seems like a win/win idea to me... Yes, it will cost some of the people making the calls their jobs... Guess what, I don't care...
What I really want to know is how much crack these judges are smoking to come up with this crap?... There are more than 50 million people signed up for the list... 750,000 registered in the first day alone... We aren't talking about a minority group that is getting persecuted here folks... I'm not trying to tell people they can't follow their own religion... I'm not even trying to censor anyone... Doesn't something, someplace guarentee my right to live without persecution?... The damn telemarketers are basically doing that... They're hastleing me... Only, its not addressed to me most of the time... its more of the "to whom this may concern" type of hastle... Broad based persecution of people who just want to be left alone...
Ok... I'm done now... (I swear the day I hear that my spam filter on my email is impacting someone's freedom of speech, is the day I go out and start buying ammunition, and road maps to the court building where the decision was made...)
*Update* This pretty much says it all...
Posted by Backstage at September 26, 2003 07:23 PM