At my house, I am usually the one that answers the telephone.

A couple of weeks ago, we started getting calls around dinner time. The annoying thing was that right after I said “Hello”, I would not hear anything back, even after waiting for a while for a response. So I had to hang up the phone. This continued for 5 or 6 more times.

One Monday morning after I walked our son to school, the phone rang again. I picked up and said “hello”. This time it was not dead silence at the other end. I heard the hesitation and the person asked for my financee. I said she was not home and if there was anything I could do for him. He said he was with the firefighter association of Illinois. And he asked for donations.

Normally I do not have problems with this. But then this guy started saying with the attitude that “we are heroes and you mere mortals are forever indebted to our bravery don’t you think you own us something?”

This really pissed me off. I told him that I am not interested and please take me off the calling list.

I think, I could be wrong on this, that it probably was them that called earlier. As soon as they hear a male answering, they would hang up, because they think that women are usually more sympathetic to their pitch and their methods of making people feeling guilty is more likely to work.

I have also gotten similar calls from police association and they would employ the same guilt technique, which is really annoying and obnoxious. I usually would ask them to mail me some information or give me a website for me to research before I open my wallet. They say they would follow up on that but never do.

Don’t get me wrong. I do believe that a lot of policemen and firefighters are brave and do admirable work. At the same time, I already pay tax dollars to support that. I also do not object their effort to solicit money, but please, don’t have that attitude and use the guilt technique.

By the way, those calls stopped coming ever since that Monday morning. They will probably come back during their next year’s fund-raising drive.