BarkingDogs.net

Using the Telephone as a Weapon With Which You Can Wage the War For Change

Introduction

The straight-forward telephone call is perhaps the single most effective and easily carried out maneuver available to the average anti-noise activist. Unlike a letter, that takes a long time to write and mail and no time at all for the politician's secretary to throw away, a phone call is a relatively efficient change agent in that, even in the worst case scenario, it will not take you any longer to send the message than it takes the politician and/or his staff to process the call.

So don't sit around and complain to your family about the noise being force-fed into your home from the outside. It makes a lot more sense for you to pick up the telephone and complain to the public servants whose negligence allows the problem to continue. After all, the people who are responsible for the threat to your family's health also happen to be the people with the power to correct the problem. So call them as often as you conveniently can. Think of it as using your telephone to cast a daily vote for a quiet world.

Who to call

To get things changed, you have to go around the accepted channels that were devised to keep noise victims from pestering the higher-ups, and land some informational hits on the members of your local governing body, who have the power to pass effective anti-noise legislation if they so choose. Obviously, you will want to target any supervisors or council members, or anyone else who has a hand in crafting legislation or voting yea or nay on pending laws. Of course, you will also want to include the mayor, or whoever heads the dog and pony show in your town. You might also want to consider including the head hancho over at the health department. It might be interesting to hear his sorry excuse for his department's total failure to protect the public against noise pathogens being force-fed into their homes.

You are likely to find that, even on the local level, even after making dozens of calls to a given council representative, you will be lucky if you are able to get him on the phone once or twice, and probably never again after that. Nonetheless, every message left on an answering machine or with the office secretary counts for something. Remember, you are not the only one calling, and our numbers are growing. We can only hope that, eventually, the steady stream of telephoned complaints will reach critical mass.

Where to Get Their Phone Numbers

You should be able to get the relevant phone numbers by going online to the search engine of your choice, and typing in the name of your city, followed by the words, city council phone. If the name of your city consists of more than one word, (a multi-word name), then, you might get better results by putting the name of your town in quotation marks.

If you prefer, you should be able to find out where you can pick up a list of the names and phone numbers of your locally elected representatives by calling either the city manager's office, or the office of the county administrator. You can locate their telephone numbers in the government pages of your local phone directory, or simply by calling the information operator.

When and How Often to Call

To be sure, you might as well call the office of at least one elected official every time that you find yourself so irritated by noise that you feel the desire to comment on it. After all, why drive your family crazy with your bitter complaints? Why not, instead, vent your wraith on the malfeasant public servants whose ignorance and inaction allows the crisis to continue on year after year?

So the next time that noise floods into your home from the street, the sidewalk, or the next yard over, and you want to vent, go to the phone and express your outrage to the responsible party who allowed the problem to develop, and now has the power to bring it to an end.

If you are in the mood to do it, why not make a call every time someone roars by your house with an obscenely loud engine? Why not call again when the neighbor's dog barks. Or when a neighborhood kid goes screaming down the sidewalk on his insanely loud motorized skateboard, why not make a call then? Call them whether or not the noise flooding into your home is illegal.

Just set yourself a pace you think you can maintain over time, and then keep it up. Even if you only call one politico once each week, just keep doing it, year after year.

You can bet that it won't be long before the people you call will begin to urge you to file your complaints through the proper channels, which is something you may or may not want to do. However, regardless of whether or not you choose to proceed through the established protocol, make sure that you also continue to make your telephone calls out of channels.

If you can't get the big cheese on the phone, which will almost always be the case, then just go ahead and leave a message with the secretary, whether or not he wants to take it. Or, if no one answers, just leave a message on the office voice mail.

Tapping In to the Power of Voice Mail

Most landline telephone companies offer a feature to their customers that will allow you to record a single message by speaking into your telephone, and then, send that message out to a number of recipients simultaneously, providing that all of the chosen recipients are also customers of the same phone company.

That means that if you receive landline telephone service from the same company as your local city government, you can set your phone service up so that, when you send a voice mail, it will be received in the offices of the mayor and all of the city council members, along with anyone else you choose to specify.

Think of the beauty of that. Every time the sound of externally-generated noise explodes intrusively through your home, you can send those reverberations along, and ensure that they echo metaphorically through the offices of city hall.

The multiple recipient voice mail approach works especially well for people who are awakened during the night by their neighbors dog, or some other repetitive noise. Each time the noise rings throughout your home, send another simultaneous voice mail out to all of your local elected officials. That way, when the office staff arrives in the morning, they will find an account of every time you were awakened during the night. With that kind of evidence flowing in through the telephone lines around the clock, sooner or later, someone will take notice.

What to Say

Many people are reluctant to telephone city hall because they don't know what to say, or they feel that they are not sufficiently articulate to explain the innumerable reasons why it is essential that every citizen of this round world be afforded the right to live in a quiet home. However, in reality, even if you are a frequent caller, you will find that it is only occasionally that you will ever actually get a politician to come to the phone. Mostly, you will just be leaving the briefest of messages with secretaries, or with voice mail or on answering machines, which is just as well, because the inescapable fact that you keep calling year after year is much more persuasive than anything you could ever hope to say, anyway. So, in the end you will persuade them most not with what you say, but with simple fact that you continue to call over time.

This page is part of the Strategies portion of Section Eight:
which is the Activist section of barkingdogs.net