Dear Phone Solicitor

Dear Phone Solicitor,

I got your call again last evening as I was sitting down to dinner. It was the third or fourth such phone call I got yesterday, so when I picked up the phone and seemed rather annoyed with your call, perhaps you can make allowances.

It all started a few years ago when I responded to a call for help for residents of a disaster zone. I got online and donated a few dollars - not much, I'm sure (I can't remember exactly - but maybe $25?). Your website needed all of my information - including my phone number. You repaid me for my kindness by bundling my phone number, along with hundreds of others, and selling it to dozens of other businesses, charities and scammers. How very nice of you. Apparently my gift keeps on giving.

Now my phone rings all day long - from about 9 in the morning until about 9 at night. Usually the caller is a computer and I'm read a message about pressing 1 to speak to an operator. How about giving me the option of pressing 2 to say, "Fuck you?"

Sometimes there's a real person on the line and they start telling me about how much a donation would mean to their organization, or how I could win a million dollars if I just send them the tax payments in advance. But there's a better than even chance that the phone call is a scam or the caller's company is skimming 50% to 90% of my donation off the top. You're preying on the elderly and the poor who don't have the resistance to fend you off. How proud you must be!

I ask you - and any real humans I get to speak to - to take my name off your calling list. And you may even comply. But next month you will buy another phone list from another group, and my phone number will be on that list, because the list they are selling you contains numbers you gave them. So the calls begin anew. Or, it is some other shitty charity/business/scammer begging for my money. Beggars. Money-grubbing beggars, that is what you have become.

And when I no longer donate money to various charities and relief funds, you can blame it on the fact that I don't want my number on any more calling lists, fuck you very much.

So when I am trying to eat my dinner and you call me? And when I pick up the phone and seem abrupt by not listening to your spiel, and I ask you to please take me off your calling list? Just be grateful I don't yell, and scream and curse at you, because that is what I REALLY want to do.


Fuck you,
Bozo

P.S. I am on the Do-Not-Call list, but apparently that don't mean shit.