My, it’s quiet.
The telephone has simply stopped ringing, even at 9 a.m. on Saturday, which is the time that telemarketers usually like to call my house.
I haven’t gotten a call in days. And I haven’t even signed up for the FTC’s national do-not-call list.
Does this mean the great medium of outbound telemarketing has been stilled?
Well, probably not yet. But the day may be coming, for the American people seem to be opting out en masse. And that’s sad, although I can’t go along with critics who say it’s the end of civilization.
The American Telemarketing Association is probably right when it predicts that 2 million people will lose their jobs (give or take a million) because of the national do-not-call registry. But that argument is not likely to dissuade Congress and the great regulatory agencies.
In their minds, the suffering of call center employees will not outweigh the annoyance caused by outbound calling. Everyone is tired of the intrusiveness, the abandoned messages, the sheer rudeness of it all.
That includes me, although I write about direct marketing for a living and feel a wage slave’s sympathy for my fellow wage slaves.
Am I supposed to feel sorry for the people at MCI, who were nasty when I was a customer but who now hound me incessantly to win me back?
Are we to worry about the chumps who worked for crooked outfits like Triad Marketing? Burglars have to eat too, but that doesn’t mean we want them in our homes.
In 1901, when telephones were still a novelty to many people, a writer observed that
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