If you've joined Angie's List, did you ever mark a category of interest?

If so, what happened?

We apparently signed up for a lifetime of spam phone calls.

My husband joined years ago and marked one single topic of interest: home repair and remodeling. Ever since, nearly every single day, we receive solicitation phone calls from prospective contractors. Hundreds. Thousands. Sometimes four or five in one day.

For a fee, my husband bought himself (and me, thank you) an infinitude of nuisance calls and gifted Angie with a small but productive gold mine. He paid to be harassed for someone else’s profit.

The list has proliferated, probably sold and resold, so many times that the number of contractors making cold calls here in the Santa Clara Valley must be roughly equal to the entire population.

And I thought most of them were computer nerds.

I don’t think there’s any more of a way to undo or halt this exponential spread than there is to stop an STD among rabbits. (Yikes, do rabbits have STDs?) We would have to give up the phone number that this household has had for 46 years. I’m still resisting that, but my resistance is weakening.

What was your experience?

Tags as I wrote them: Angie’s List, phone calls, spam calls, call lists, scams, paying for the privilege.