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| Monday |
the Nineteenth of July, 2004 |
Between freelance jobs, I'm shocked to realise that my internal
spam-filter is absolutely hair-trigger now - phone me at home during
the day, and pause before speaking, and ask if I'm Mr
Surname-of-Non-Wife, and you're already way beyond 100%; I'm not really
listening, and you've got the time it takes me to walk the phone back to
its wall-socket to get some convincing keywords out. I very nearly hung
up on a couple of false positives the other week, one of them partly (and
appallingly) because they didn't have an English accent.
But the Telephone Preference Service is here to protect us, I'm reminded
by a wishy-washy
article in the Observer. I'd heard that "TPS" could be whispered as
a mantra to send terse cold-callers shrieking and withering back to their
pit, but hadn't ever gotten around to finding out how to set it up. You
can register your number with them online, and any telemarketers
who call you by mistake once you're on the list will face a £5,000 fine.
But presumably you have to trick them into revealing their name and
company, and rolling their office-chair on top of the hidden trapdoor,
first.
I think I'll also be getting the impressively-mutated Mr K K Pavis excised
from existence through the TPS's sibling Mailing Preference
Service, as the world still thinks he deserves excitingly-coloured credit
cards. (There's also the obscure and slightly sinister Baby
MPS, specifically targetted at sparing bereaved parents from years
of baby-related mailshots; the main MPS service makes passing mention
of how upsetting it can be to spam the dead, and dead babies get their
own rapid-reaction squad.)
While I'm here - impressive to see a couple of spams using the LiveJournal
"Reply to your comment" subject line, although they couldn't resist putting
a load of random numbers on the end. I'm still waiting for "$random_common_name
has listed you as a friend at madeupsocialsoftware.com!"
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