Cold Calling

So there I was, just settling down to dinner when the landline (which is only installed due to being a prerequsite for ADSL) rings.

"Who can this be?", I ask myself. "Everybody I give this number to knows that I prefer being called on my mobile."

So I walk over to the phone …

"It can't be a cold caller, I've signed up to the TPS."

… but it is a cold caller. Not just any cold caller though, this one is a heartless machine playing me a recording, and thus immune to the abuse I would otherwise have been tempted to hurl at it over the wire.

Time to do some digging. It seems that I need to know who the offender is before I can make a complaint. Five minutes work on the British Telecom website fails to yeld any useful contact details, so I rip the shrink wrap from the telephone directory I thought I would never use, and find the number for reporting nuisance calls.

With five minutes to go before the lines shut I call them. They know all about this problem. The calls are blanketing the country, presumably generating an awful lot of complaints, but are coming from overseas - so there is nothing BT can do about them.

"Drat", to put it mildly.