I LOVE going back over the year and looking at readers’ responses to my column. It provides a perspective I lack when I’m focusing on one column at a time and receiving comments piecemeal.
Associated Press
Operators in 1951 at the United States General Services Administration’s switchboard, which served more than 20,000 government phones. Readers were passionate in expressing irritation at robocalls from telemarketers.
The passion, the insights, the desire to share a story, a helpful hint and yes, to correct a real or perceived wrong, are all there. And inevitably, I find that one column stands out above the rest in terms of reader response. It’s usually not the column I consider most weighty or philosophical, but rather one that addresses an annoying problem people regularly face.
This year, it was robocalls. In fact, I devoted a second column to the issue after the first one, on May 19, got so many comments. Those two yielded by far the biggest response. Some readers pointed out — quite acerbically at times — that the most obvious and simple tools to deal with such annoyances are Caller ID and an answering machine. Don’t answer a call you don’t recognize and let the answering machine pick up.
Yes, most people I know do that, but with call spoofing, when telemarketers use fake phone numbers, it’s sometimes hard to tell even with Caller ID if it’s someone you need to talk to. And when we let the answering machine pick up, perhaps in a distant room, listening to see if it’s someone you need to talk with can be difficult.
In any case, it’s annoying and disruptive, especially for those who work at home, to have the phone ring five, six, seven times a day with sales calls.
As Julia Belt of Madison, Wis., wrote: “Instead of being a means to communicate, my phone has become an instrument of harassment in my home. Wait — the phone is ringing, my answering machine message begins, the incoming call hangs up. Some days, this happens three or four times.”
Many offered suggestions to get back at telemarketers. The most popular was to answer the phone and then walk away. Philip Gribosky of Norwalk, Conn., said his brother puts the phone down, but does not hang up. “He then goes back to whatever he was doing before, leaving the telemarketer on the line for an extended period of time. Since he might leave the telemarketer hanging on for 15-20 minutes, time they’d rather spend calling your readers, he now gets virtually no telemarketing calls.”
Many, many readers also told me that although they filed complaints with various government agencies, as I had suggested, it seemed to do no good.
I decided to go back to the Federal Trade Commission and pass on my readers’ frustrations.
William Maxson, the commission’s program manager for Do Not Call Enforcement, said all the complaints are put in a database, which the F.T.C.’s lawyers and investigators use to find problematic conduct.
The agency recently filed a case against a company that — talk about nerve — faked the commission’s own 1-800 number when calling people. It was a scheme involving a promised rebate from the F.T.C. if a victim provided his bank account number.
Mr. Maxson told me that since the Do Not Call registry was put into place in 2003, 289 companies have been sued and more than $69 million collected.
“Billions of robocalls have been stopped,” he said. But he certainly knows the difficulty in tracking down and blocking telemarketers who constantly use new technology to stay one step ahead of enforcers.
To do more, he said, the commission is asking for your help. Until Jan. 17, you, can submit solutions to block illegal robocalls by going to FTC.gov/robocalls.
The other columns that hit a nerve this year were ones that addressed people’s anxiety about what can seem to be endless pressure to be — or at least appear to be — successful, exceptional and happy.
For instance, my June 30 column on redefining success and embracing the ordinary was my second-most popular of the year.
People eagerly agreed with the author Katrina Kenison, who told me she wanted “to heal the disconnect between what I observed around me — the pressure to excel, to be special, to succeed — and what I felt were the real values I wanted to pass on to my children: kindness, service, compassion, gratitude for life as it is.”
I did expect at least a few comments admonishing me for embracing the idea of average and ordinary, but I received not a one.
