Call Blocker: IT’S HERE!

Think of that: here’s a post that never got published. When did I write it? Thursday or Friday. ‘Yere ’tis: more to come…

So Amazon delivered the CPR V5000 call blocker gadget practically overnight. Some guy in a white truck threw it over the front wall onto the concrete sidewalk. It doesn’t seem to be broken, though.

By the time it arrived, a little before 11:30, two nuisance scammers had already jangled the phone — one at 7:30 in the morning. So as you can imagine, I surely do hope this thing works and the bastards don’t find a way around it.

Nothing could be easier to set up. You just unplug your phone at the base, snap the plug into the V5000’s jack, and then connect the V5000 to the phone with a conveniently short cable that comes with.  And…now we’ll see how well it works.

The defunct TeleZapper device was still connected to the phone. It’s been useless for a long time: the telemarketing crooks quickly found a way to defeat TeleZapper. So I tossed that in the trash.

What a tangle of wires! Out the door with those: This new doodad doesn’t have to be connected to an electric outlet. It’s just the phone cable and the connection, effectively placing the V5000 in series with the phone. So that tidies up a mess I had to hide by velcroing it, in a great wad, to the back of the cabinet where the phone sits.

Five thousand known solicitors’ and spoofed numbers are already programmed into the thing. So, in theory, just plugging it in should cut down the frequency of calls from the git-go. Then as you get nuisance calls, you just push a button (or punch #2 from a cordless extension) to add the numbers to the device’s capacious  list.

In theory, you’re supposed to plug it into the phone that’s directly connected to the phone company’s incoming line. I’m not sure which one that is. The Cox guy put the filter in the middle bedroom, which is where the Uniden base unit resides. So I’m guessing this will work. But it would make more sense to believe the main line is coming into the office, where the computer and the modem live. The phones run on a Cox cable, not on the old-fashioned phone line, and I believe that cable runs along the outside of the house into the office phone outlet.

The problem is, said outlet is underneath and behind a table that’s too heavy for me to move. Getting to that connection is extravagantly difficult, involving a great deal of floor-crawling and contortions.

So, because the filter is in the middle room — which, I vaguely recall, was the reason the phone set had to go there instead of on my desk — I decided to try that first.

From what some commenters say, the thing will work from any phone jack. If it’s unhappy, what will happen is it will allow one ring to get through before it kicks in. In that case, you’re supposed to…oh…you know…follow instructions and plug it into the cable company’s incoming jack.

But that shouldn’t be as difficult as I feared, since you don’t have to climb under the table: all you have to do is unplug one phone and plug in the gadget.

God, how I hope this thing works. I’m so sick of being called once every couple of hours all day long, starting at seven in the morning!