Early last November I posted about our new phone system that freed us from using all but caller ID through our phone service. Essentially this has saved us about $30 per month since we got the phone. We have been extremely pleased with it's performance. The only problem we've had is somehow accidently erasing the phonebook but that was easily fixed. This phone holds up to 30 blocked numbers which is a real handy feature for avoiding telemarketers.
The problem with telemarketers is they keep changing their phone numbers so as soon as you have one blocked they use another number. If 3 telemarketers each have 5 lines they can use there's half of the allowed numbers to block by this phone. The sad part about this is if you sign up to Canada's National Do Not Call Registry the calls actually increase as fines for calling are not enforced. One of the worst things we did was put our phone number on that registry!
Today I found myself with the blocked numbers list full after getting 2 telemarketer calls so that meant it was time to clean out the list. In the ideal world you could just empty it and start again but that doesn't help for the persistent telemarketers. What I did was list the numbers then run each through Google. Each number will come up in the search results usually with entries on 800notes.com or whocallsme.com. Checking the numbers I found 2 that are now being reported as no longer is service and 3 iffy ones. The US just did a huge crack down on telemarketers calling both the US and Canada so another 4 are quite questionable. For now I'll delete the 2 confirmed dead and 3 iffy ones. That will give me time to see if the other 4 are dead as well. With any luck as the list fills up again I can start deleting from the oldest entries that hopefully discouraged by their unsuccessful attempts at calling us have moved on to greener pastures.
Garden Gnome
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