ABC Eyewitness News – STONY POINT (WABC) – October 12, 2009:
A Stony Point man is accused of luring an Sears employee to his residence and then attacking him.
The Stony Point Police Department arrested 61-year-old Daniel Adler after receiving a call about a fight in progress on October 7.
The investigation revealed that Adler was upset with being called by Sears Home Improvement telemarketers, and he reportedly scheduled an appointment to advise them to place him on the do not call list.
Police say when the victim arrived, Adler cut up his identification card and then punched him in the face.
Here’s the thing with a telephone: You can hang up! Yeah, oftentimes the calls come at very inconvenient times and it pisses me off. But the second I detect that the call is BS, I hang up. I don’t have to listen and I don’t have to say a word beyond “Hello”. I hang up and go back to what I was doing and in 15 minutes it’s all forgotten.
pfkad,
I call BS.
It is MY phone. I pay for. I pay for the right to make and receive calls on the telephone network.
How in the hell did we get the point where telemarketers think they have the right to use MY equipment to harass me? To me it is no different than if a door to door salesman let themselves into your house every evening. It is trespassing on private property.
Truly amazing how the apologists excuse the “service personnel” who got punched. He wouldn’t be there if not for the invasive abuse by the telemarketers who scheduled the visit. I know I am not alone in congratulating Mr. Adler for his appropriate action–he is a true hero.
The phone companies (qwest here) won’t give residential accounts the tools to stop this harrassment. If you pay extra (I did), they’ll let you block calls by caller area code etc (goodbye calling centers in Florida & Texas), but they won’t let you block callers with blocked ID, or better still, ‘only allow calls from my city plus a short white list’. Given the approx 200:1 ratio of junk calls to legit calls we were getting before the blocking service, it’s hard to believe the lack of solutions is due to lack of demand.
#22, yanjer,
To me it is no different than if a door to door salesman let themselves into your house every evening. It is trespassing on private property.
Actually it is more akin to a salesman knocking on your door. All you need do is tell them “No”.
If you want to deny all social contact to everyone, that is your right. You do have an obligation to let it be known up front though.