Are you the party to whom I wish to be connected?

Okay....I'm a bad, bad person.  I think I blogged not long ago how frustrated I was getting with the National No Call List folks, because I was being inundated with all sorts of calls, from early in the morning going well into the early evening.

Starting Monday of this week. Rather than letting these nuisance calls go to my message center, I've actually been answering the calls...and I've been mean, angry, rude, and insistent that I be removed from their calling list immediately. Otherwise, I will report them to the National No Call List Folks, and there will be Hell to pay.  I think a couple of times the person on the receiving end of my 'pick-up' had to make a quick run to the bathroom when I was done with my rant, because I sensed I scared the 'you know what out of them'.

Honestly, for years I have tried to be nice to the folks making these calls, and I've spent quite a bit of time taking surveys, listening to spiels, saying no to carpet cleaners, and politely insisting I don't need auto insurance. I realize they are just trying to make a living.

However, over the last several years, I've come to believe, these folks hate their job, you can tell by the lack of enthusiasm in their voice...because they know 99.99% of the people they call are going to say no to whatever it is they are selling.  As a result it was harder and harder for me to be nice in return and I simply stopped picking up the phone.

For a while the National No Call List actually seemed to work.

However, over the last couple of weeks I have been inundated with nuisance phone calls.  I have been letting them go to voice mail.  In the evenings I check to see from whom the calls were coming.  Most of them start with the letter V, with a bunch of numbers after them.  There is never a message so immediately I've been deleted the call.  Yesterday as I was flipping through the numbers I discovered an actual phone number appears seconds after the V number so, when I got another V call today I let it go to my messages and then called the number back.  Imagine my surprise when I got a message in return.  It said and I quote "this number does not accept incoming calls".  Seriously...no joke...I could not leave a message.

What????

This number V does not leave me a message...the telephone number associated with the V number does not accept calls...is this the ultimate oxymoron or what??????? Seriously, think about it.  The world's gone mad.

But, here's the thing.  Apparently, miraculously, my being a bad, bad person is starting to pay off.  Today I have had only one phone call and this has caused me to ponder.  Do all telemarketers work from a single list, and is it generated on some kind of inter-related/ telemarketers Internet connection?  So that as I started to speak to all these people they did indeed remove me from their Internet connected list, and by so doing, am I eventually going to disappear from the list all together? 

I can only hope, I can only hope.