Political Robocalls

This morning I got my first “robo-call” from a local politician wanting my vote in the upcoming September special election for state assembly. We have a special election coming up in September? Who knew?

And so it begins again. I hate robocalls, with a passion like the fiery burning of a thousand white-hot suns.

On the one hand, one of the few things that Congress has done that I’m a big fan of is the “Do Not Call List“. We signed up instantly when it went live a few years ago.

On the other hand, every spammer, scammer, and troll out there pretty much blatantly ignores the DNCL. There is really no way to enforce the DNCL laws since it’s so trivially easy for the scum telemarketers to spoof their caller IDs. When you get one of these calls for “credit card repairs” or “carpet cleaning” or “home improvements” or whatever, there’s no way to know the actual name, address, or phone number of the slimeball company calling you. They don’t care if you hang up, it’s just a computer. It’s already gone on to the next automated call.

If you click past the computer robocall and get a human to ask for any of that information, demand that they stop calling, threaten them with an FTC complaint, or simply cuss them out and vent your frustrations at them, they simply hang up on you. Even when you do manage to find out the information needed to file a complaint, there is so little enforcement that it’s a complete joke.

You and your anger and frustration mean absolutely zero to anyone involved, either those inflicting the robocall interruptions on us or those who are supposed to be stopping them.

The best part of all is that the politicians, upstanding leaders of our society that they are, wrote the DNCL laws and exempted themselves from it. Politicians and political campaigns can robocall you until your ears bleed and there’s not a thing you can do about it. Their justification was that it was necessary in order to insure we had open and free elections and campaigning. (Can you say “bullshit”? Sure. I knew you could!)

Do companies actually get any business out of these robocalls? Have you or anyone you know ever done business or paid good money based on a robocall or telemarketer? EVER?

Do politicians actually get any votes out of these robocalls? Have you or anyone you know ever voted for someone or something based on a robocall or telemarketer? EVER?

It’s a mystery to me. I don’t know of a single person who could answer either of these questions with a “yes”. (If you can, please, please, PLEASE let me know in the comments!) Yet there must be some return on the money spent to do this kind of “advertising” or “marketing”. If there wasn’t, simple economics says that they would stop. Yet it keeps getting worse. Ergo, it must pay off. Who are the people who aren’t as annoyed by these calls as everyone I know?

Sometimes we go for weeks at a time with our phone off the hook or unplugged, simply in order to avoid getting called a dozen times a day by some idiot machine or another. At the moment, due to a couple of other things going on in life, that’s not a good option. Ditto for simply ignoring the ringing unless it’s someone we recognize. There are a couple of potential calls we can get at any moment that we really, really need to get and we won’t recognize those numbers. We’re a captive target audience.

The only small control we can have over this problem lies with the politicians. They have to let us know exactly who or what they’re pushing or it’s truly a waste of their time and money. But in doing so, they also make sure that we know exactly who’s bothering us and pissing us off.

I had never heard of the guy who had the political robocall from this morning. I have now, which I guess satisfies part of his campaign’s goal. But I also went to his website, hit the “contact us” button, and fired off a capsule summary of my feelings on robocalls and pointed out that I now vote for the guy who robocalls me the least.

I have no clue who he’s running against, but I know that he has called. Like the old joke says, “That’s one!” He’s now in last place in this race as far as I’m concerned.

Any political campaign consultants out there listening?

(P.S. – in the half hour or so that it’s taken to write this rant, I’ve had two more robocalls, one on duct cleaning and one on credit cards.)

(P.P.S. – there should be a software patch in WordPress so that when I flag a post with the “Politics” category, the “Freakin’ Idiots!” category automatically gets flagged as well!)