mearle@pro-party.cts.com (Mark Earle) (08/27/90)
John Higdon writes of his continuing trouble with receiving calls from the newspaper telemarketing effort (I'm a little unclear if it is internal or contracted, but that does not matter). John says the temporary solution is for them to inhibit dialing of a complete exchange, since they do not know how, or cannot, actually not call specific numbers. Here in Corpus Christi, TX, a machine aparently makes the rounds of various organizations (I hear of it as being resold often) with a similiar flaw. On several occasions, my voice and modem lines got calls from this thing. The exchange in question was 850. Fortunately, (yes!) in this case, they messed with the wrong folks. 850-0 to 850-8 are pagers, DID for cellular, etc. Only 850-9 is residential. After a week of getting a pitch on my car phone, and my pager going off very often.. the calls stopped. The pager company tracked down the source of calls and had them stopped. This same sleeze machine would not release your line for two minutes (length of pitch). Quite an annoyance. This was six months ago, and just yesterday this nonsense started happening again. Guess the machine got re-sold to another sucker, who is not in until Monday; even if you call the number in their pitch, you get THEIR answering machine. Arrrrgh! Complaints to the approprieate PUC bodies, and the phoneco, but guess until mid week we're stuck (we being the pager and cell phone users). Oh well. Joys of modern technology! Aparently this machine just starts at the beginning of the exchange and dials up incrementally. Maybe they'll PO some hospital this time, or better yet the Police Department. Well, I can hope, can't I? mearle@pro-party.cts.com (Mark Earle) [WA2MCT/5] CIS 73117,351 MCI Mail to: MEARLE My BBS: (512)-855-7564 Opus 1:160/50.0 Blucher Institute, Corpus Christi State University [Moderator's Note: I think for all you guys who have noted that the machine will not release your line for 'x' minutes the key is in your picking up the receiver every few seconds to see if the line is free or not. Every time you pick up the receiver, hear the message still playing and hang up again, you are resetting something in the CO. Try hanging up *and staying hung up* for 30-45 seconds or more, then lift the receiver. Chances are that will have been long enough for the CO to have found you gone and dumped the caller. PAT]