Rant

To some extent, my family has won the war against the telemarketers, but it's a Pyrrhic victory. Our Telezapper filters out telemarketers and annoying recorded spiels. The effect of the Telezapper is that several times a day, usually during dinner, the phone rings, we pick it up and get a dial tone, which is preferable to some poor shmuck trying to pitch a time share. Unfortunately, our swing state status means that now the phone rings approximately every three minutes, presumably with messages from organizations under the mistaken assumption that my political views are shaped by random strangers' phone calls. In self-defense, we've turned off the ringer, so now every three minutes we get to hear the answering machine broadcasting the I-just-hung-up-on-some-idiot klaxon.

Listen to me, you evil bastards who design telemarketing software, if my Telezapper blocked your call the first 500 times, chances are it will stop it the next time you call. Would it not behoove you to write a subroutine that recognizes your defeat and takes the number off the queue, saving you from wasting your time? Or is the fact that your Phonebot 3000 keeps calling just a punitive measure designed to annoy Telezapper owners into submission? It won't work, you techno-dweeb hucksters, we will not be broken! FREEEEEDOM!--F. Andrew Taylor