I got an email saying that in about a month direct marketers are going to be allowed to call your cell phone. Is there no escape? Fortunately, there is. You can enter your phone numbers (land, cell, fax, whatever) into the national Do Not Call Registry and get a little freedom. It takes about 59 seconds:

“JUST A REMINDER… In just 30 days, cell phone numbers are being released to telemarketing companies and you will start to receive sales calls.YOU WILL BE CHARGED FOR THESE CALLS. To prevent this, register online at or call 888/382-1222 from your cell phone. You can add up to three phone numbers at a time.”

Supposedly, you can also just tell telemarketers to put you on their do not call list when they call you, and if they don’t, you can sue them for $500. Good luck.

Personally, I like to engage them when I have a moment. I like asking them if their products are organic, and why not, and if their company has an environmental policy and if they use post consumer recycled office paper and stuff like that. When they call offering me cheap long distance I always say, I bet mine’s cheaper than yours, here, let me give you the Web site (I own a phone company called SellingOut…). Nice just to engage human beings on the other end of the line sometimes. Also nice to just hang up!

Perhaps even more important that getting yourself on the don’t call registry is taking a few steps to eliminate your junk mail pile, since so many resources are involved in making that crap and getting it to your door.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 14th, 2005 at 6:13 pm and is filed under Enviro. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.