A giant envelope containing one of those “political surveys” that’s actually a thinly disguised fundraiser arrived, with this confidence-inspiring ID in the upper-right corner:
The questions were all examples of false dichotomies.
A pox on their backsides, sez I.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 
My current second least favorite is the two-part phone sell: the first part pretends to be a consumer survey (or, my weakness, a radio station music listening survey) and the second part, after they’ve gotten some info, is the “oh hey you won a prize!” call where they try to get someone over to your house to present you with your prize and oh by the way demonstrate a vacuum cleaner system.
My least favorite is the “we’re calling to schedule delivery of your “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up” alert system, “that looks like someone has already paid for the installation so we just need to drop it off” with no mention of the monthly fees.
We’ve gotten much more selective about answering surveys, as it seems to me an enterprising thug could sweeten the odds of finding interesting households with a bit of demon dialing.
We put ourselves on the national do-not-call list (it works, mostly) and have learned to be forceful in phone surveys. We get the political “surveys”, but they get destroyed before opening. Outside of election season and the rogue telemarketers, there’s a minimum of unwanted phone calls. Most of those are from people we do business with, and they understand that “no” means “apologize and hang up if you still want to do business with us”. Small communities can work really well that way…
It certainly cut down the number of unwanted calls, but that just means the rogues form a huge percentage of the calls we get these days. I generally press 1 (or 4 or 6 or whatever) to get “a live agent” and then ask what it’s like to scam people all day long; I’ve stopped being at all sympathetic to their plight.
The do-not-mail list works pretty well, too. Long ago, we came back from a week-long vacation and got three big mail tubs the next day. Nowadays, we get barely a trickle.
I wish we could turn off the huge catalogs from places I’ve bought one thing from, years ago, and probably won’t buy anything from again. I’ve tried, but to no avail, and I’ve given up.
You are far nicer than I am. If it’s a robocall, we’ll hang up immediately. If it’s a live person, they’ll be told to not call us again, etcetera. We’ve had a couple of investment types from the credit unions (long story) cold call us, and they got the “flaming turndown of death”. One of those still works at the credit union. The other might be clutching his pearls to this day…
We did skip a couple of legit polls in the 2012 elections. Not sure why they’d bother polling us, in a very conservative country in a very liberal state. Maybe the demon dialer had a buggy database.
I found a disturbing writeup on robocalls. It turns out they make money just for ringing your phone (from caller ID lookup fees paid by your local phone company), whether you pick up or not. Ick. http://telemarketerspam.wordpress.com/2013/01/29/public-utility-callerid4u-inc-involved-in-millions-of-illegal-robocalls/
I’d always wondered at the number of “blank” calls we get; I assumed it was an over-eager robodialer that got too far ahead of the humans, but wondered at the economics. Now I know: they get paid even for unanswered calls!
And that confirms my suspicion about what happens when I “press 4 to be removed from the calling list”: they pay special attention to my number.
Seems like all the government snooping on folks like us could be put to good use on scum like them, doesn’t it? [sigh]