Unplugging the Telephone
Telemarketers
Drive Me Crazy
Well, I did it, I pulled the plug. Huh? I unplugged the house phones. Ever since the kids moved out, the phone seems to be ringing off the hook. Mostly telemarketers. We were getting all sorts of calls from vacation packages, to long distance cards, to refinance your morgage.
I tell them, "Sorry, we're not interested." trying to be nice. But then the telemarketers switched to a answering system, where it's just a recording. We put our phones on a answering system too, and they were leaving their whole sales pitch on our answering machine.
Even when we did get a "real" voice, like the mortgage dealers, I told them, "Please take us off your list, we're renting." But they still were calling every couple of days. Then they got smarter and started saying, "Well are you interested in buying, we have great mortgage rates!"
Phone Bots?
Many times we would pick up the phone and there would be nobody there. We were thinking it is some kind of "phone bot" that randomly calls numbers just to check and see if somebody is home so that the telemarketers would know when to call.
Eventually, we stopped answering the phone... period. And every week there would be like 30 telemarketers on our machine.
The "No Call" List
But, you may be thinking, "Get on the "no call" list. Our friends did that, and they are still getting calls. So what good is that? Our daughter says, "Get caller ID." Why, I say? We would still be running to the phone to see who it is.
We have cellphones, and most people we want to talk to call our cellphone. So unplugging the housephone really isn't an issue. We would just have the phone taken out, but our DSL runs through it.
I'll tell you though, it has been "nice" the past couple of days. Nice and quiet...
New Pages
Prepare for a Recession?
- I'm starting a list here of some things we are going to do to try to prepare
for this... somehow.
We Put Solar Lights in our
House - We've had a set of outdoor solar lights outside our house for 3 years,
and thought, "Why not put outdoor solar lights "inside" the house?
Wind
Turbine Test - We started thinking about how we could build a wind turbine
to generate our own electricity.
Magazines
for Toddlers - I wanted to send some magazines to the grandbaby for something
to do during winter.
