Many of us, I’m sure, have subscribed to the National Do Not Call Registry. Having done so we’re not supposed to receive calls from telemarketers. Unfortunately, the registry still allows calls from politicians, charities, survey companies, and organizations we may have done business with in the past. What the registry unaccountably doesn’t block are irritating calls from “Rachel of Credit Card Services” or an apparently endless supply of charlatans eager to sell products we don’t need.

We have caller ID on our phone, which displays the telephone number of callers not only on our phone but also on our television screen. We can tell at a glance the origin of incoming calls. Many of the calls come from “private caller” or “out of area,” so we know to ignore those. Most of the time those calls are from telemarketers, so to combat those persistent creeps, several years ago we installed a phone-call zapper. The device blocks calls from telemarketers and tells predictive dialing computers that our phone is disconnected. Our phone will usually ring three times, and then abruptly the caller will be disconnected when the little zapper does its job.

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