This is your Captain calling no more…
It’s 6 o’clock. Dinner is made, and the TV is on. You’re just sitting down after a long day of work, or school, or in the case of anyone who works in a school… both, when your phone rings. Your first instinct is to ignore it, the second ring seems to come and go without you giving it another thought, but then that third ring, that ominous third ring. Flashing through your head are the craziest of ideas. You’ve just won the lottery. Your friend is stranded somewhere and needs a ride, your boss needs you to come in for an extra shift, or your mother is calling you…. Again. Against your better judgment you get up and make your way over to the phone.
The fourth ring now piercing the peaceful sound of the theme from Y&R as your PVR plays back today’s latest installment makes you ask yourself why you even have a phone. You place your hand on the receiver, and a split second before you pick it up you wonder to yourself why the call display isn’t showing you who’s calling.
“Hello”….. silence. Nothing. “Hello?” again, nothing, and then… “Is this Mr Or Mrs Arlsburg?”
The telemarketers shrill voice digs its way into your brain like an Asian Pine Beetle munching its way through Canada’s forests. You try to cut them off, to say no thank you, or perhaps you’re a rude person like me, and you simply hang up. The end result is always the same. Either right away, or after some telephone wrangling you hang up the phone and make your way back to whatever it was you were doing before someone decided to inject themselves into your life through the ancient and questionably evil art of telemarketing.
Canadians have long been annoyed at these terrorists of the telephone, but there was nothing they could do to stop the seemingly unending onslaught of harassing calls… until now.
The CRTC has bravely forged ahead and decided to enact a Canadian Do Not Call Registry a mere five years after the visionary leader George W. signed similar legislation into law in the United States. Just as an aside, when you are watching Jeopardy thirty years from now and the answer is “The National Do Not Call Registry was his one and only achievements for which he is fondly remembered for” The question will be who is George W. Bush
Under the new Canadian regulations consumers can log on to the very easy to remember URL of http://www.lnnte-dncl.gc.ca/ and register their home, and cell phone numbers on the list. Telemarketers will then be prohibited from calling you on those numbers or face stiff fines. Companies who receive complaints can be fined $15,000 per call.
Not everyone is beholden to follow the new do not call registry however:
Registered Charities seeking donations
Newspapers selling subscriptions
Political parties and candidates
Or companies you have done any kind of business with in the last eighteen months.
In fact, Dr Michael Geist, the University of Ottawa Law professor who is well known for his writings on technology and privacy issues writes that up to 85% of telemarketing calls will be exempt from such a list. These organizations however must maintain their own do not call lists, and stop harassing you if requested.
To combat this the good doctor created ioptout.ca. The purpose behind the site is to give you the choice of which companies and groups (if any) you want to be contacted by. Once you register your number and choose the companies, and organizations that you do not want to hear from an email is generated and sent to them requesting your name and number be removed.
A month after the service went live the Canadian Marketing Association and the Canadian Bankers Association sent letters to CRTC Chairman, and proud owner of the coolest name in all of Canadian government Konrad von Finckenstein arguing the requests coming through a third party were invalid. The chairman shot back at the two groups saying that nothing in the new law prohibited such requests and declaring them to be valid.
Great news for me and you, not so great for that guy trying to sell you a free vacation. (Yeah he called me too…) Both the National Do Not Call Registry (which went online September 30th) and ioptout.ca may be just what the doctor ordered, and may just be the key to me finally enjoying a full hour of the Y&R without being interrupted. Now if only I could get my mother to stop calling while I’m trying to watch.
