Do Not Call Me (marketers)

Important: This is mostly for the Belgians among you

A few weeks ago, I was talking to a colleague via Teams and at some point he was interrupted by a phone call. He took the call (I told him that I would wait as it seemed "to do something with him") and I heard him speak to the person that called him. It was a really polite discussion, but I could clearly hear the tension in the voice of my colleague. At the end of the discussion, he asked to stop calling since this was the fortieth time that he was called by a telemarketer on this given week. After we hung up, he excused himself to me and we talked a bit about it. Apparently, it was really bothering him since this had been going on for weeks... You can understand how he was suffering from this and how his (personal) productivity was impacted!

Then I told him something that had been evident for me for a very long time, but apparently he didn't know about it. I'll assume that he is not alone and for that I just want to repeat it here in the hope that more people (in Belgium) can be reached:

In Belgium, there is an arrangement/law that allows citizens to register themselves on a central database that lists all the people that want to "opt-out" of telemarketing. That list is the starting point of something beautiful: every telemarketing company in Belgium (doing the so called 'cold calls') needs to check if someone is on this list, before cold-calling someone and when there is a match, they cannot call you in any way.

This is also described in detail on the website https://www.dncm.be/ where you can also register yourself:

A long time ago, I had the same problem and didn't like the fact that complete strangers were calling me to propose a solution for a problem, that they think I had. That is when someone told me about this thing and I immediately registered myself! After that, it took a few weeks to propagate and then it stopped! No more disturbances and thus more time to focus on stuff and things that really matter!

I hope it helps you too!

Tim