Word: caller
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While technology has greatly expanded the telemarketers' reach, it has also given consumers weapons to fight back. Caller ID--which is used by 38% of U.S. households today, up from 30% in 1998--at first allowed users to detect calls from salespeople and other pests. But telemarketers learned to mask their numbers so that they read as UNAVAILABLE or OUT OF AREA on caller-ID displays, and users often answer because they think the call might be an urgent one from a friend or colleague--an impulse that's especially prevalent in these days of orange alerts...
Major phone companies offer services like SBC's Privacy Manager, which for $5 a month screens calls that don't register on caller ID. Anyone with an anonymous phone number is required to identify herself, and if she's a telemarketer, you can press a button to activate a pre-recorded message telling her not to call again--a request that telemarketers are required under federal law to respect (but one that many nonetheless ignore). "Clearly this is a privacy war, and many times the phone companies are the arms dealers," says Robert Bulmash of Private Citizen Inc., based...
Politicians in other states have begun to realize how much voters hate telemarketing. In Indiana, attorney general Stephen Carter was elected with help from an ad that showed his daughter spilling milk on the dinner table as Carter is saying, "Not interested" to a sales caller. Carter pushed the state legislature to adopt a do-not-call list, for which more than a million Hoosiers have signed up. And he has aggressively prosecuted companies that call people on that list. Overall, states have collected more than $3 million in fines against telemarketers over the past four years...
...urgent phone call had reached me the evening before. I recall it was Sunday, because on a weekday I would never have been home earlier than 10 p.m. The caller told me that Konstantin Chernenko, the General Secretary of the party and leader of the Soviet Union, was dead...
Murphy is accustomed to calling plays, as he was the primary play-caller for a majority of his time as head coach...