Curse of the Commercial Phone Number

...and my cellphone, too.

It's grown to be beyond the nuisance stage.
Now, daily, my company phone/cellphone receives at least 8 or 9 telemarketer and/or robocalls daily.
Yes daily.

Whether personally or for business, what an incredibly unproductive interruption these calls are.

No, I'm not talking about the 2011 Robocall scandal.

My calls--and likely yours too--are ostensibly from telus, but they're not! ("get a $20 a month saving"), from loans available for business ("wouldn't your business benefit from an infusion of cash?"), from previously unheard of types of point of sale merchant terminals ("faster than your current supplier"), to all manner of business supplies including toilet paper ("wouldn't you benefit from cheaper paper supplies?")...

Appropriately named, a book called the Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell gives a bit of history, beginning with email in the 1970's where the author eagerly anticipated receiving emails, leading us up to the present where junk calls and emails have increased tenfold.

Now if only Canada would do what the UK did in 2006.  The United Kingdom increased the penalty for "silent calls" tenfold!  What did Canada do?  Well, they allowed people--sick and tired of calls--to actually place the phone number on a Do Not Call list.  Then, because of freedom of information laws, (yes...really!) some idiotic bureaucrat forgot to disallow telemarketing companies from accessing that new list of numbers to call.

Like an idiot, we subscribed to that Do Not Call list, and gave them our numbers.
All our numbers several years ago.

"So I suppose we can blame ourselves for at least some of these interruptions," says Kia.

Yeah, I suppose.
And one would think that we would've stopped trusting bureaucrats by now...(sigh)

That ought'a do it for the small number of door knockers.

Now what to do about all those telemarketers...who, by the way, I can't even understand mostly.