Ring, Ring, Ring

Our telecommunications system is broken. Anyone want to argue the point?

I admit it does many things well. It has never been easier or faster to pick up a phone and call or text a friend or relative, to make a reservation at a local restaurant, to find out what time a movie starts or even to get a map and directions when you are driving in a strange neighborhood.

Yes, the system does all those things well. Very well.

But, still, it is broken. The problem is that millions of us are bothered every day by annoying, unwanted telemarketing calls. Some of us get calls or e-mail chats from people overseas, telling us we could be really rich if we only send them some money,

So, two or three calls a day - maybe five or six - don’t seem like too big a price to pay for our wonderful telecommunications system.

But that’s me, and that’s you. And it’s your friends and neighbors and strangers down the block and in the next city, on farms and college campuses and just about everywhere else. As a society, our communications arteries are getting clogged.

Just look at me. I have just about stopped using e-mail.

Why? Because it is becoming a monumental waste of time.

I do look at my e-mail a couple of times a week. The last time I looked, I had about 500 messages. Now I could mass delete them, but then I could lose something important that I might have overlooked.

But if I looked at them all - say I can open, read, close and delete each one every 30 seconds - that’s 250 minutes. Sixty minutes in an hour, so if I did nothing else, it would take more than four hours to get rid of all the offers for K-cups, new storm windows, solar panels, lawn services and special discounts on trips to Paris, Scotland and Nikola Tesla Airport in Belgrade. And lots of other things.

I can cut it all down to a half hour every week or so by clicking on each message with an address that I recognize and do not want. And I could use all that free time to listen to all the voicemails backed up on my phone.

I’ll pick on all the the coffee pod offers for just a minute, because I really like coffee and because their sales techniques are so similar to other products. Once you look up a supplier and buy something on line - ah, that delicious dark French roast or a delightfully-flavored raspberry dessert coffee - the offers just keep coming and coming. 

Even when you don’t search for anything, the orders still come anyway. I can’t even begin to count how many “final offers” I have gotten from a credit repair firm which calls me from a spoofed local number when its computer-driven calls actually come from some boiler shop in another country.

So how did we get this way? Progress, unchecked. Here’s how it all started.

Telephones were invented in 1876, and a year later the first telephone line between Boston and Somerville, Mass. was completed. New York and Chicago were linked in 1892, and New York and Boston in 1894. But the first phones linked only two customers. You had to buy two phones, and give one of them to whoever you wanted to call.

It took a retired Kansas City undertaker, Almon B. Strowger, to invent a switch that could link any single phone to up to 100 others. Every phone had a button that you pressed a certain number of times to get the phone you wanted to reach. The rotary dial came into use in 1896, but the Strowger switches remained in use for a century.

You see how it happened? Technology was invented, then put into use. Now computers can make calls, so let them make calls. It’s quick and easy and almost free. Don’t want the product, well just hang up. It’s a free country, isn’t it?

Well, no.

While computers can make an almost unlimited number of calls for almost nothing - the number of calls is limited only by the number of human operators who pick up when you give the right response to a sales call - they do have to pay their workers. But, the people who pay the most are the ones who buy whatever it is they are selling.

And, they work on a very low response rate. Depending on the product being sold, the telemarketer can make money if only two or three people out of a thousand make a purchase.

It’s all legal, because the elected federal officials and their appointees have set up the regulations that cover telemarketing to make it legal.

So, what’s my fast and easy way to stop all those annoying calls and e-mails? Simple - we just let capitalism do the job. It’s a simple two word plan. PAY ME.

I think a dime would be fair. Any computer that calls my phone has to pay me ten cents. Heck, if they want to call before 9 a.m. local time or after 10 p.m. local time, pay me a quarter.

And I don’t mean they have to send me a check. That would be silly. Just take the money off my phone bill and pay it directly to my internet service provider.

If they want to spend $10,000 to reach 100,000 people with phones, that’s fine with me. I live in a county with nearly 1.5 million people. If someone wants to spend $150,000 to call those 500,000 households once, be my guest.

If it  doesn’t work, we could always raise the cost of making unsolicited calls to fifty cents or a dollar. And to sweeten the pot, calls from political candidates and their supporters could be made free for three weeks before primary day and four weeks before an election.

Now I admit there are some free speech issues involved here, but there are also some Constitutional issues dealing with the right to privacy and the quiet enjoyment of your property.

Maybe we should require that the home and cell phone numbers of company officers and majority stockholders be given at the start of any unsolicited call. That way we could call them back and thank them personally. 

Maybe while we’re at it, we could sell them some solar panels.