Kindly Uncle Nitnorth's Rant du Visite

From elton@sybase.com  Tue Sep 30 11:58:13 2003
Subject: fun with your telephone

I've been enjoying, for certain aberrant definitions of "enjoy",
following the continuing trials and tribulations of the national
do-not-call registry.  Saw this in a Reuters article today:

> Americans have placed 51 million phone numbers on the no-call
> list, [...]
>
> Most of the largest telemarketers have copies of the [national
> telemarketing do-not-call] list and will observe it, said Jerry
> Cerasale, a vice president with the Direct Marketing Association.
> But many smaller telemarketing companies do not have copies of
> the list and thus do not know who does not want to hear from
> them, he said.


The DMA -- and, by extension, the telemarketing industry -- don't
employ rocket scientists, do they?  The list has 51 million phone
numbers in a country whose entire population is about 300 M.
Even if we assume that some people will have registered their cell
phones along with their home phones, I'm still not ready to believe
that there's one phone per man, woman, and child in America.  Even
if there _were_, that list contains more than 1/6 of the nation's
total population.

I'd be ready to claim that it contains more like 1/3 of the nation's
phones.  And who knows how many it would contain if everyone knew
that the list existed and trusted that it wasn't just another tool
to obtain valid phone numbers?

The answer I'm unavoidably drawn to is that NO ONE wants to
be called.  Now, _that's_ a big shock, innit?

			-- Elton

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