Hello my friends, I appreciate your thoughtful posts. To blame me as discriminatory does not solve the problem. I am one of many who will no longer take the time to answer the relay. I have never had a legitmate call on the relay. Patience is not my virtue & that's not going to change. Call me discriminatory but that's The way things are. If I was discriminatory, I wouldn't have come to you in the first place and discussed this matter. But as you have pointed out, I am just one of many who will no longer take relay calls. Of course you are frustrated when your calls aren't taken and if you, as a community don't do anything about it, more of your calls won't be taken & you will become more frustrated. To blame me or other business people is to behave like victims and accomplish nothing but more frustration. You are handing your valuable service over to the scammers. The more it happens the less business people will take the calls. I predict that the relay will ultimately die as a result. The scammers win. You lose. And maybe some business will be lost. But the business people won't know that.
We ARE the VICTIMS. WE are the victims of the scammers, and so are YOU. BOTH the Deaf community AND the Hearing world are the VICTIMS of the scammers. I am not blaming you. I am blaming the SCAMMERS. We are NOT handing the service over to the scammers. They found out themselves that they are able to take advantage of the system to scam everybody and their mother. They did it themselves. We did NOT hand the service over to them. We did not say "Hey scammers, go ahead and call the relay system at this number and go scam the Americans out of their money". We are not that dumb. You are being rather insulting right now. We feel that since you WON'T take the time to let us identify ourselves and explain ourselves and tell you that we would like one of your dogs, you are DISCRIMINATING against us. It is not fair that you will NOT provide service to the Deaf community just because you don't want to take the time to let us explain ourselves and tell you that we are interested in one of your dogs. It's only a few minutes. But as you said, patience is not your virtue. Well, if you own a business, you are required to have patience in order to run a business successfully. But since you are not going to have any patience and allow us to identify ourselves, explain ourselves, and tell you we are interested in a dog of yours, you are losing our business. That's not a successful way to run a business, and not a very ethical way to run it, either. You know, you could get in trouble with the law according to the ADA laws. Maybe someone in the Deaf community decides she or he is interested in one of your dogs, decides to call you via the relay system, and then is told that you do not take relay calls, and then gets hung up on. That person could get angry enough to take action and possibly hire a lawyer and SUE you for discrimination, no matter what YOUR reason is. IF she or he wins, you could stand to lose a lot of money, and thus even lose your business.
That's something for you to chew on.
If you really value this service you need to clean it up. I would like to suggest to your community that you take action. This is your service. Your voice needs to be heard. If the FCC is the ones making the law that prevents you from being heard, then go to the FCC. or your elected representative. Its up to you to find out who has the power to change the law and then pressure them to change it. I would think that they might welcome suggestions on how to reduce access to scammers. They probably don't know this is happening.
Presently, when a relay call comes in, I talk to the operator then there is a long wait while the operator gets info from the caller. Perhaps you might want to insist that the law be changed so that the operator gets all identifying information from the caller including ph# and address & purpose of call & gives that to the recipient up front before we have to wait for the first words from the caller. Also, I would want the phone # to come from the operator's caller ID so that can't be scammed. I don't ship dogs overseas so if its a local #, I might be more inclined to accept the call. That's what would make me, as a business person take the call. Perhaps you have other, better ideas. Maybe you need to ask other business people what would make them more amenable to relay calls.
It took decisive action and many years and a lot of work for disabled people to pass the ADA. I would respectfully recommend that your community do what those folks did to gain equality. YOu have the ability to change the law and make it work for you to streamline & keep your valuable service. Otherwise, when enough people refuse to take calls, the service will probably die out. Please keep me posted. Puppy love from Tippytoes & the furry folk
So we are the only ones who should take action and clean it up? YOU should get involved, too. Not just the Deaf community, but the Hearing world needs to get involved. We are tired of being the only ones who have to fight for ourselves with no help from the Hearing world. It would be quite nice if the Hearing world would get involved and help us fight for our rights and for our right to good service and to be able to make relay calls to businesses without the scammers getting in the way of us conducting business with others. It is not up to ONLY us. YOU, too. You and the Hearing world too. We BOTH should be in this together.
You think the FCC doesn't know about this? They have known about this for quite some time. It's been going on for some time, and if they don't know about this, then they would be quite ignorant for not knowing anything. No. They know. They just will NOT change the FCC rules on filtering out scammers. BOTH the Deaf community AND the Hearing world needs to UNITE together and pressure the FCC to change their rules and pressure them to allow the relay operators to use Caller IDs to see where the call is originating from, and then filtering out any call that comes from out of the USA. The more people that pressure them, the better. We BOTH also need to go to our representative or congressperson as well. And even then, I am not so sure FCC will be willing to do that, because maybe the people from other countries, the legitimate people who are NOT scammers, will get upset about this and there will be an uproar about this because of course there are Deaf people who have family and friends who live in other countries who want to call us, and that would not be fair to them. They will call this discrimination, too. So, it's a Catch-22. So, if the FCC were to change their rules, they would have to change it so that the relay operator will accept calls from out of the USA, but also talk to them first and figure out whether they are legitimate people or scammers, and then filter out the scammers (there are obvious signs) and then if the calls are legitimate, they will then allow the calls to go through to the persons they want to call, but it's going to be a bit complicated and could take some time to do this. If the Deaf community, the Hearing world, and the legitimate foreigners who live overseas are willing to put up with the extra time needed for the operators to filter out the scammers and all that, then that would be great. But, I am pretty sure that sometimes there will be scammers who can still fool the operators and are able to make the calls go through to us. It then falls on us (both Deaf and Hearing) to figure out if this call is a legitimate call or a scammer call and then we have to make the decision whether to continue the call or hang up. We still have to do that, it is still our responsibility (both Deaf and Hearing) to do that. That's just how it is. It sucks, I know. But we, the Deaf community, would appreciate it so much if you, the Hearing world, the Hearing businesses, would take the time to talk to us and give us a few minutes to explain ourselves and then figure out if we are legitimate callers or a scammer, and then make the decision whether to continue the call or hang up. Otherwise, the Hearing businesses will lose our business. Not so good, especially in this economy nowadays, it is? Think about that. In this crappy economy nowadays, you (the Hearing businesses) are going to really need our business. Our business would help you a hell of a lot.
If you (the Hearing businesses) would take the time to let us explain ourselves, then YOU AND US will WIN, and the SCAMMERS will LOSE. If you hang up every single time you get a relay call from anybody, you LOSE, we LOSE, the scammers WIN. Do not let the scammers win by making you hang up every time you get a relay call and losing the Deaf community's business.
We were part of the disabled community that helped pass the ADA laws. You think we sat on our asses and did nothing while the OTHER disabled people did the work? WRONG. We helped pass the ADA laws. We got involved. You sound like you are accusing us of doing nothing and that the OTHER disabled people were the only ones who helped pass the ADA laws. That's quite insulting.
Also, it sounds like you are accusing us for the scammer calls by saying that we have to clean it up if we do value the relay system. It's not our fault. You know, you sound like you don't really support the Deaf community and that you care only about your own business. We do want the scammer calls to stop, we do want to get the FCC to change the rules so that the relay operators can filter out the scammer calls, but we need YOU, the Hearing world, to get involved too and to help us do it. We shouldn't have to do it ourselves alone. That's not fair.
If you feel you can't handle the relay calls at all, then perhaps you should shut down your business and get a job at Walmart or something like that since you don't belong in a small business as a owner if you can't handle relay calls at all. Business owners should not discriminate against us just because the scammers are calling you/them. That is not fair to us. It is NOT our fault. We did nothing to cause the scammers to call you. They did this all on their own, they figured out that all they have to do is call the relay system on their computers and have the relay operator dial the number and call you and say they are deaf and try to scam you without you being able to identify the person who is calling you. They are THAT smart enough. Don't underestimate the foreign people.
They took advantage of our relay system and of the Deaf community as well as the Hearing World. We, both the Deaf and the Hearing people, value the relay system very much and use a lot, and we really do need the relay system. Most of the Hearing world do value our relay system because it allows them to communicate with the Deaf community. Obviously you do not value the relay system at all and the fact that it allows you to communicate with a Deaf person who do not have a computer and has to use a TTY instead. The relay system is designed for BOTH the Deaf community AND the Hearing world so they can communicate between each other, so it is not on ONLY us Deaf to handle this, but it also falls on the Hearing world as well, since we do need their help in combating this problem. You sound like you are refusing to help us in this matter and saying that this is our problem, and that we need to clean it up ourselves. You seem to care only about yourself and your business, and not the fact that there ARE some Deaf people who would like one of your high-quality dogs. That's rather insulting to us as the Deaf community.
:roll:
All this is my
Lucia
