spugbrap’s blog

I’m having an annoyance right now from some evil marketing company, possible in Maine, or maybe the UK. I don’t really know. They call my grandcentral.com number, and since I’m getting fed up with it, I sent a message to grandcentral support today. Here is that message, which describes the problem I’m having:

I’ve received this call from 5 different numbers over the past 2 weeks. They show up on my grandcentral.com account as coming from the United Kingdom, with a +44 prefix. Here are the numbers:
+44 2074225790
+44 2088082763
+44 2088981403
+44 2088093629
+44 2074413433

When I pick up, the recording is in mid-sentence, and says something like “This is your final notice for an interest rate reduction. Press 1 to speak to a live operator.”

The first couple times, I just hung up.

The second and third times, I tried pressing 1, and got put on hold, but I was on the road and my call got dropped.

The next time, when I pressed 1, I got put on hold for over 6 minutes (all the while planning to place THEM on hold as soon as they picked up), then finally the hold music stopped and the call ended quietly. Nobody ever answered.

The last time, today (2/15/2008) at 1:46pm, I answered quickly, and hit 0 which made the greeting message repeat. It said something like “Hello, this is Heather with Account Services! This is your final notice regarding an interest rate reduction on your credit card! Press 1 to speak to a live operator, or press 2 to stop receiving these notices. Since I’d already shown them that I’m alive by pressing 1 on previous calls, I pressed it again this time. I was on hold for less than a minute, then someone answered, saying “Do you have a balance of $3000 or more on one of your credit cards?” (or something like that). I said “Please hold for the next available operator” and put her on hold. She hung up before I got around to picking back up (I was going to wait at least 2-3 minutes, if possible).

Anyways, I’ve marked all 5 of these numbers as spam on my grandcentral account, and changed my preferences so spam numbers get BLOCKED rather than going to spam voicemail

The problem is, they call from a different phone number each time! I’d like to block ALL numbers that start with +44, or even starting with +4420. I do not expect or care about any legitimate calls coming from numbers that match those prefixes.

So, do I need to just let them keep calling me, and just send them to voicemail, and deal with the fact that they’re going to keep calling me? Or can you block them all somehow?

Every time I get a call where they just hang up, or from a company that’s annoying me, I go to whocalled.us and look up the number/post info about it. Usually the numbers are not listed there, yet, but I’m mentioning this site because if we all report evil spammer companies there, as a community, it will become a more valuable resource over time.

The only reason I ever pressed 1 at all is because I wanted to find out what company was behind this evil automated phone call crap. Since they mentioned credit card interest rate reduction, that narrowed down the possibilities to 2. If I could find out which company was responsible for this, I would cancel my card, and complain publicly about their horrible marketing scheme. At this point, though, after hearing that live operator ask a stupid question, I know that it’s not from any of my credit card companies. It’s just some evil marketing company, and/or scammers. I hope grandcentral is able to help me out with preventing future calls like this!

This afternoon, at work, a dialog popped up from the LANDesk Security and Patch Manager. That’s fine, and all, I don’t mind having the IT people making security patches automatically get installed on my work laptop, when I’m at work.

But, what pisses me off is the dialog that it gave me:

At first glance, it looked like it was giving me up to 2 hours to get to a stopping point in my work, before it would force the update to take place. I’m not thrilled with having a deadline before a forced upgrade, but I understand that the sysadmins have tens of thousands of workstations to maintain security on, and the laptop belongs to the company, and so forth. At least this was nicer than forcing the update to happen right away, right?

But then I tried to go back to my work, and it showed its true colors. The stupid LANDesk countdown window (and its parent window) are “always on top”, and do not respond to Minimize messages. There is no minimize icon on the window’s title bar, and the “Show Desktop” shortcut (which usually minimizes everything, even things that don’t have ‘minimize’ options of their own) was ineffective against this LANDesk dialog.

Without getting this dialog to go away, getting any more work done was going to be difficult. :( I did figure out that I could drag that window out of the way, so the leftmost edge of it was just barely visible on the rightmost edge of my screen. Also, my TextPad window had an Always on Top option, which allowed me to bring it above the LANDesk window. But I was already distracted from my work, so I decided to take a couple screenshots, blog about this, and tell it to go ahead and install.

I went to a local Cingular Wirelss store last week, to get a new SIM card to use with my new phone (my old SIM that I’ve been using for the past couple years was not good enough for my new phone.. something about the 3G features and stuff).

Then, over the weekend, I got an automated phone call from Cingular, which left me a 1:17 voice mail. I found it funny for a couple reasons:

1. It didn’t recognize that it was leaving a voice message, so it just sat there waiting for a response, and repeating itself.
2. It called me, then complained that I was using the wrong kind of phone!

Below is a transcript of the voice mail. If you’d like to listen to it, here is an mp3 of this voice mail from the automated cingular survey.

…from the Customer Feedback center for Cingular Wireless, now the new AT&T. For English, press one. Para recibir atención en español, oprima el dos.
[6 second pause]
I’m sorry, but we were unable to record your answer. I will repeat the question for you. For English, press one. Para recibir atención en español, oprima el dos.
[6 second pause]
I’m sorry, but we were unable to record your answer. I will repeat the question for you. For English, press one. Para recibir atención en español, oprima el dos.
[6 second pause]
I’m sorry, but we did not detect a touch tone response. In order to complete the customer service survey for Cingular Wireless, now the new AT&T, you must use a touch tone phone. If you would like to call us back, the toll-free number is 1-800-882-9484. Again, that toll-free number is 1-800-882-9484. Thank you! Good-bye.

Does anyone else think the voice sounds a lot like Emily Procter (Calleigh Duquesne on CSI:Miami)? I doubt it is, but I kept thinking that as I was listening to it a couple times to transcribe it.