For three days straight, I’ve been getting prerecorded calls from conservative christian groups asking me to expect something in the mail and pushing a right-wing agenda.  Each time I filed a complaint with the FCC, but they take months to track this down.  Here’s what I did to stop them.

I called the FCC, they now have a complaint hotline.  I just wanted to make sure that what they were doing indeed was illegal.  They provided their name, but they did not provide a phone number to be removed from their calling list.  Plus, they did not claim to be a tax-exempt organization on the phone, another requirement.  Thank you, FCC.

Then, I called my local carrier, which happens to be AT&T.  They insisted there was nothing they could do, but I pushed.  I asked about the specific number.  They said it was unlisted.  I asked for more information, they said it was a land line.  So I asked specifically, who is their local carrier who is responsible for the number?  They said “Lucre” was all they had.  He didn’t seem too happy to give this information, or to acknowledge that he had given it to me.  A quick search found lucre.net, a local carrier in Western Michigan, which matches the area code of the phone number.  Excellent.

I called their local number and immediately someone answered.  He took my complaint, acknowledged that it was illegal, and said he would call them up and ask them what was going on.

At the very least I got off the list.  Hopefully, I stopped lots of people from being harassed in their homes.

As technology progresses, it seems that corporations are becoming more and more out of touch with their customers. Many would argue that companies lost their “mom and pop” feel long ago, and this is true, but even so, the problem has become ever more annoying in modern times, these days even telemarketing has become automated, with machines calling your home automatically to advertise offers.

What is really curious to me is why people are putting up with it? I mean honestly I have to say that anyone could come up with an idea as stupid as “hey, what if we just automated our call centers and made people press buttons to access the right department!” … However, I think most intelligent people would have concluded that such an idea would never work, because people would want to talk to a human being. But interestingly enough, this is an example of a stupid idea that became successful for the wrong reasons. Not because it was a ‘good thing’ or because it was innovative or good for the customer, but rather, because most customers didn’t take notice or care until it was too late, and shockingly enough, they still don’t! People keep calling up these companies and they keep waiting for hours on end to speak to someone, and then they bitch about it, but do nothing to stop it.

Companies claim that by doing this they can ensure ‘lower prices’ for their products, but I think we all know that they are full of manure. They’re not “passing on the savings” to us, they’re passing on the savings to their own pockets. And honestly, I think most people would pay a price premium for the peace of mind of having a tech support safety blanket should something ever go wrong.

Even more frustrating is that if what you want to ask isn’t on a cue sheet, the person on the other end of the line simply cannot help you… I mean seriously, you know a company has bad tech support when Googling for the answer yourself yields more results than speaking with their support people.

Recently at home, we re-did our electric box, and they had to remove the pole outside of our house where the wires come in, because apparently it’s currently against code for it to be where it was, it has to be at the corner of the house. So we had to call our service provider to come and take their wires off of the old pole and relocate them to the new one. We had to call them several times, no one on the other side of the line knew what in blazes we were talking about, one told us that they had to get approval from our power company to touch our set up (which was total bullshit), with each call we had to wait over an hour on the line, and we were forwarded to several different departments, each one had no clue whatsoever what we were talking about. We asked to speak to supervisors, and when they transferred us, we discovered that we had not been transferred to the correct person. It was pure hell. Then finally many calls later, we were informed that we had to pay them approximately 100 dollars for them to do this, which just added insult to injury, and was also total bullshit given that we’re already paying them a fuckload of money every month for their services. I guess their point is that their time is worth money. Oh yeah…? What about my time? Maybe I should send them a bill for all of my time that they wasted.

This is just unacceptable. Analysts everywhere keep saying that the future of business is services… Services this, services that, services everywhere. Honestly, if this kind of service is the best they have to offer, then I doubt they will do much. I think we need a business revolution, a return to a classic model of obeying the customers’ needs and wishes. Modern corporations are really subverting the will of the consumer, Digital Rights Management (DRM) being the largest example of this.

The modern idea is no longer “the customer is always right”, but rather, “the customer is our bitch”.

He’s the American Idol winner, and the top of Yahoo!’s buzz list, but who is David Cook, really?  If you Google “David Cook”, then you’ll be one of many people who are searching for the hottest term on the internet.

Is he a good singer?  Does anyone really care?

Would you rather the other David have won?  Did you even vote?

Personally, I don’t care about American Idol at all.  I’d rather watch Chugga-chugga-chugga Dance.

Dalton Hatfield is an 11-year-old boy who sold his bike and his video games to raise money to support Hillary Clinton.  That seems crazy to me.  Why did she take it?

Nevermind that, some local politicans raised the money to replace his bike and video games with better ones.

That doesn’t sound ethical.  I’m sure there’s a campaign finance violation there somewhere.  Effectively, these local politicians are hidden donors.

If I have 10 children, can I now donate $23,000 additional to a campaign, $2,300 in each of their names?

Taking money from a child.  Bragging about it.  This is not Presidential.  This is not leadership.