"Let's face it, the only thing that will stop telephone spam is total failure to get business that way..."

Absolutely! And the fact is that some people do respond positively to telemarketing and telemarketingresearch. They like having their opinion count in surveys, and they love the convenience of sellers calling them up personally and offering them good deals on merchandise that they might want. If there weren't such people, the calls wouldn't be made.

Our task, then, is to find some way to let the callers know that we're not in that group and never will be. The TPS, and the National Do-Not-Call Registry are ways of doing that, but some organizations may not have access to those databases. There's probably an expense involved, and they may feel they're better off avoiding that expense. For those callers, we can try telling them when they call. But we should do it in a clear and unequivocal manner, not in a way that suggests mostly that we're in a bad mood at the moment.