Random Thought: Phone Grief
Don’t you just fucking love being called day in day out by call centers? You just get home from minding your own or someone else’s business, usually on a friday, and we’re off… *ring ring* Would you like to subscribe to…? *ring ring* Your current power company, insurance, mortgage, cable package, isp, newspaper and your current life are clearly inferior to the alternatives we have to offer. Would you like to switch now?
Don’t get me wrong, I am not hating the call center employees. It’s great that they have a job and for some things a call center can be useful. It’s not the employees I mind, and I regularly wish them good luck, a good day, pleasant evening, you name it I’ve wished them it and only good things. I mind the companies that use them for sales, outgoing, intrusive calls, overloading people with information to get them to agree to something they really haven’t bothered to consider properly… No.
Along came Caller ID. Somewhere between the 70s and the 90s it became available to the public. Good, that evens the ground between companies and consumers. So why aren’t we applying to phones what we learned to use in e-mail traffic? Proper filtering… Let the end user decide which numbers can, well, FOAD. We don’t need to *know* these numbers as such, as long as some phone company knows them, which is true since a connection is established. Combined with something as easy as an online interface to set up this filter.
One seems to be able to filter one’s mail (return to sender), e-mail (block), front door (just leave it closed you git)… but not one’s phone? Not properly anyway… It sucks. It seems something that can be solved. If so, then it should be solved.