Sorry, Wrong Number

I received a phone call the other night, just as I was about to take a bite of my wife’s heavenly lasagna. A distracted female voice said, “Hello, Alfred,” and I instantly hung up. It was my big sister, Emily.

Telemarketers and Emily are the only people in the world who refer to me as Alfred, which is my full first name. Telemarketers call to sell me something. Emily calls from Oakland to pray for me. I thought it was a sales pitch. I was wrong.

Emily had read that the homicide rate in L.A. was going up again and was intending to pray for my safety until I mistakenly hung up on her. She called back indignantly and said I could go to the devil and hung up on me. Thanks to telemarketing, I am now in trouble with both God and Emily.

My response to the ringing phone was Pavlovian. Call me at dinner time and call me Alfred, and I instantly figure it’s a junk call and begin to drool in rage. And then I hang up.

I mention this to illustrate why I cheer the efforts of City Councilman Mike Feuer to end the kind of unwanted merchandising that has me in a state of zero tolerance for any unsolicited calls, and now has Emily in a state of aching indignation.

Feuer introduced a motion that would declare war on privacy-invasive telemarketing. Based on a successful New York statute, it would allow a citizen to place his name on a do-not-call registry that telemarketers would be required to purchase. If a company called a person on the list anyhow, it could be fined up to $2,000 a ring-a- ding-ding.

The L.A. motion, passed this week, goes to the city attorney to draft an ordinance for the council’s final approval. I say, approve it.

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By one estimate, the 10 largest telemarketing agencies in America have the “firepower” to make 560 calls per second, all of them while you’re eating, showering, making love or, as in Emily’s case, praying. She does that a lot.

The estimate comes from Robert Bulmash, founder and president of Chicago-based Private Citizen, an organization that seeks to control telemarketing. He says there are 400 to 500 agencies in the U.S. that use the phone to peddle everything from high-tech robots to root beer floats.

Each of the nation’s 145 million residential phones receives an average of three calls a day, Bulmash says. That adds up to 435 million telephonic voices busting into your privacy every 12-hour period, and the rate is growing at about 15% a year.

It didn’t take a genius to figure out the whole thing was getting out of hand, and a lot of people began shouting out their windows that they were madder than pit bulls and weren’t going to take it anymore. Within a month of enacting do-not-call legislation, more than 180,000 New Yorkers had signed the registry blocking unwanted calls.

In addition to annoying sales pitches, there are hang-ups too. The phone rings, and no one’s there. That’s because a “predictive dialer” machine that calls in the first place gets a wrong message that your phone is being answered by an answering machine and hangs up. Machine versus machine. Is that 2001, or what?

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Mike Feuer got into the whole thing because he was tired of “defending” himself against invasive telemarketing by monitoring every call to see which of them were sales pitches.

“On a personal level, two working parents with two young children have a minimum amount of private time together, and we don’t want it intruded on,” he said the other day. “Most of these calls come at breakfast and dinner, the two worst times of day. Why should we have to endure this?”

We’re under assault in the first place because all those cash-hungry companies out there don’t give a rat’s kazoo how much they intrude, as long as they make money. They don’t care about our privacy, our safety, our stress rate or our homicidal tendencies.

Private Citizen’s Web site quotes a survey that says 82% of those questioned consider junk calls a nuisance and an invasion of privacy. The system takes door-to-door selling to an electronic level that’s turning a ringing telephone into a call to arms. And it’s bound to get worse.

Short of monitoring every call, ripping the phone out of the wall or hunting down and torturing every unwanted caller, laws are the only means we have of protecting ourselves against America’s corporate effort to drive us all crazy.

I just hope they never figure out how to send commercial pitches through mental telepathy. Even Emily praying all night wouldn’t be enough to keep the devils from invading our brains.

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Al Martinez’s column appears Sundays and Wednesdays. He can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com. But don’t call him Alfred.