My Telephone Land Line is Now Just a Way for Telemarketers to Drive Me Completely Raving Insane

Working out of the home, I now realize my home phone has evolved from a useful communications device, into a telemarketers automated messaging system locked in my own private space. Because I am around, I mentally log about 10 automated telemarketing pitches a day, often from the same robot, every day, going on months now. The robots are selling extended vehicle warranties, satellite cable plans, and strange insurance for things I have no need for. I also get about 5 live telemarketers calling me every day, trying to give me credit cards, book, insurance, newspapers, and other crap. Sometimes the telemarketer is from a credit card I already have. Now, I know I could be ignoring the phone when a name comes through I know is a telemarketing call, and I do exactly that when I can. But the fact that the phone rings every hour, or sometimes a few times per hour, and it is all junk calls, this begins to make me a little aggravated.

Here's a way to guarantee I will never do business with you: First, call me with an unsolicited prerecorded message. It will piss me off extra fine because, 1. You don't even bother to have a human call me, and, 2. I didn't ask for your services and they don't match, whatever they are. Now, call me every single day for 3 months with the same message, until I am so distracted-pissed-off by your pitch I take the time to look you up and call you, just to get you to stop calling me. Perfect -- I now will absolutely never do business with you, even if you were selling heart lung machines and I needed triple-bypass surgery.

Despite this, I still need my land line. I depend on it for work, and my own business. So I tell the human telemarketers to take me off their call list, and they say they will. But then new automated ones and human telemarketers take their place. I signed up for the national "do not call list". But the larger question for me is -- what the fuck happened to my phone being useful for me, rather than a tool for someone else?