The National Do-Not-Call Registry.

Don't get me wrong; I do think the Registry is a good idea. Anything to cut down on those mindless parasites that call unbidden at all hours of the day or night. I just wish they'd implemented it a bit better, or considered beforehand that a lot of people might be interested in registering, and on the first day the service was available.

My experience with signing up for it was tedious at best. While I never got the "servers overloaded" message, I got its functional equivalent. It would take 10 or 15 minutes to go from one step of the process to the next. When I finally got to the end of the signing-up portion of the process, I eventually got the screen that said, "Okay! Just one more thing to do! We'll send you an email with a confirmation link that you have to click on to be fully signed up! You'll get it in about a minute." Well, I didn't receive that email in about a minute or two. I didn't receive it in an hour. I kept checking all day long, and it finally showed up seven and a half hours later.

I suppose they felt bad about taking so long to send me that automated email, so they decided to make up for it by sending more emails with the confirmation link. Eight additional emails, in fact, spaced out over the next 18 hours. And it wasn't that they were just sending me reminders because I hadn't yet confirmed and time was running out, because all of the extra emails arrived after I'd clicked the confirmation link.

But those extra emails seem to have stopped (*knock on wood*), and I'm willing to have had a one-day spike in email spam if it really has the effect of cutting down the amount of telephone spam I get.