Growing up in the 90s, at one point the local car dealership mistakenly printed up letterhead with our number listed as their fax number and for like 7 years we got two calls a week that were just beeps and shrieks as a machine tried to handshake
Also this was the high era of live telemarketers (usu. from the low-wage \u201cNew South\u201d, not yet offshored to India and the Phillipines) who \u201cwould always call during dinner\u201d (bcuz they called between when people came home from work and when they went to sleep, bcuz the target market no longer had stay-at-home home economists)
Now that I think of it as the decade went on you picked up more often to dropped calls, as computer programs to minimize downtime optimized more ruthlessly
(The big \u201890s innovation was Wal-Mart with its ruthless procurement optimization, they made your sales staff fly to them in Bentonville and pitch on margins alone and you couldn\u2019t treat them to steak or strippers or prostitutes to make that human connection)
Anyway point is even for all that it was less annoying than robocalls now, I\u2019ve had my phone on DND for like 2 years
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