Plan for Cellphone Directory Dials Wrong Number

A year from now my cellphone rings.

Four people in the world have my cellphone number -- five, if my brother actually is a person, a topic of some debate between us since that lamentable incident with the dental drill in second grade.

So unless it’s a misdialed number, I will know who belongs to the voice I’ll hear on the other end of the line.

I don’t. What I hear is a strange, chirpy, “Hi, Ms. Morrison, this is Shag’s Carpet Cleaning Service. Can we sign you up for our special this week -- three rooms plus the carpeted cover of your toilet seat, all steam-cleaned for the low price of $109?”

I hear my airtime minutes tick, tick, ticking away. “No thanks,” I say, “but while we’re on the subject of toilets, I’d like to stick your head into mine. Who are you, and how did you get this number?”

“It’s listed right here in the national mobile phone directory, between Morons for Minors’ Smoking Rights and Mouse, comma, Minnie.”

The national mobile phone directory. It isn’t real yet, but it will be compiled, probably just in time for Christmas, and junk phone calls about Shag’s Santa Claus special cleaning offer.

*

Ordinarily I don’t have to look beyond California’s borders to find something corrupt or dumb that needs someone to holler about it. In just the last few days, there’s been the news that supervisors at Southern California Edison knew employees were covering up crummy service to win $28 million in bonuses by running rigged customer surveys ... and the story about the Sacramento minister who proclaimed that women who leave their children behind to work four days a week as legislators are sinful.

I can’t do much about the Edison scam -- it’s done with. And I can’t do any more about the minister and his absurd notions.

But this, I can raise hell about. I’ve been mad since I read my colleague Jube Shiver’s story in last Thursday’s paper, that most of the nation’s 163 million mobile phone numbers will be collected into a database that just about anyone can get into by calling 411.

Someone else was already as mad as I was, and much better positioned to do something about it. Joe Pitts wouldn’t ordinarily be hero material for me -- he’s a conservative Pennsylvania congressman who has, by my standards, voted the wrong way on all the big stuff: tax cuts, the patients’ bill of rights, campaign finance reforms, faith-based charities and abortion rights.

But I’ll be his groupie any day, because he’s got a bill to stop my cellphone number and his and yours from winding up on some telemarketer’s call sheet. I called his office, and Joe My Hero called me back. I asked, isn’t this something that goes against your politics? “I prefer the private sector to solve problems if they can and not regulate,” he says to me, “but they haven’t played straight with me ... They say, ‘We’re not going to violate privacy,’ and I say, ‘Then you should support the legislation.’ ”

“Fightin’ words from Fightin’ Joe!” The feds opened a “do not call” list to stop telemarketers, and 57 million people signed up in less than a year. Spam faxes are illegal.

Hooters, the restaurant that swears its name has nothing to do with mammaries, had to pay $9 million for sending unsolicited faxes via a telemarketer. (What could it possibly say -- “Come check out our delicious breast meat specials”?)

But the technology is again running ahead of the law. This directory would make your cellphone no more private, no more protected, than your mailbox, or your e-mail address; your cellphone would overflow with the same crud -- except you might have to pay for it -- in air-minutes, and even as incoming calls and text messages. There’s a cost of doing business all right -- and you’ll be paying it.

Joe My Hero and I are on the same page on this, too. One way or another, the cellphone folks can make one skip-loader full of money on this. They’ll make it by selling this directory, and they’ll make it by making us pay not to be in it. A shakedown racket. You or I tell someone that if he doesn’t pay us, we’ll post his cellphone number all over town, and it’s blackmail. Do it 163 million times, and it’s business.

Oh, no, no, no, the industry protests. We’d never do that.

Oh really? Then why the fine print? It’s in the contracts, but the sales people are hovering over you at the cellphone store and by the time you finish reading the fine print, the phone you’re buying would be obsolete.

The fine print language from six major cellphone companies all runs along these lines: “Unless you arrange otherwise with us and pay any required fee, we may list [your number] in a public directory ... you consent to our use and disclosure of your name, address and [phone number] for any lawful purpose, including without limitation the provision of directory assistance and publication of directories.”

That’s why, to the industry’s protestations, Joe My Hero says, “I don’t want promises. I want a law.”

*

Chris Cox, the Newport Beach Republican, has joined Joe Pitts on his bill. Cox called me from his cellphone -- he’d just gotten off a plane to California, and even telemarketers can’t reach you in flight. “It’s already enormously difficult to live in the 21st century,” he says, “with everyone in contact with you 24/7. At least we ought to be able to limit that 24/7 availability.”

Californians are crazy about privacy. Half of all the SBC home phone numbers in California are unlisted -- more than anywhere else in the country. If there’s anybody more private than Californians, it’s the Amish. A number of Joe Pitts’ constituents are Amish, “and some of them,” he tells me, “do have cellphones.”

When we hung up, he was heading out to meet some of his Amish constituents.

It turns out the Amish don’t like this directory idea any better than the angry people calling Pitts’ office from Florida and Washington and Idaho last week do, and perhaps even less. I can’t think that farmer Abner Stolzfus would welcome the idea of putting down his pitchfork to pick up his ringing cellphone just to hear a telemarketer inquire whether he’d like to get the latest Victoria’s Secret catalog with the new line of lace thongs.

Patt Morrison’s columns appear Mondays and Tuesdays. Her e-mail address is patt. morrison@latimes.com. Her earlier columns can be read at latimes.com/morrison.