They were surprised by this??

I, for one, was expecting this.

Demand for Do-Not-Call-List overwhelms system
by the Canadian Press

OTTAWA - Thousands of Canadians hoping to put annoying telemarketers on permanent hold jammed a government website Tuesday, trying to register their numbers for the national Do-Not-Call List.

I found this part funny...

CRTC spokesperson Denis Carmel said as of 1:30 p.m., more than 223,000 people had register via online and telephone.

"It's way beyond anything we'd expected," he said.

"On the telephone side, more than one million people tried to access the system. It's clearly over any estimation we had done," he added.

"We'd no idea that it would be so successful on initial phase."

Is he serious? Unexpected?

My husband, darling that he is, registered us very early in the day, since he's up so early to do his work out before heading to his job. He'd sent me the link to the site yesterday. We were talking about it that evening, and we both were expecting the system to crash. I guess the CRTC just didn't realize how pissed off people are with these calls.

It's not to bad for us right now, but at one point we were getting up to 20 calls a day. Yes, twenty. We went from getting almost none at all, to that. What a pain!! Virtually all of them were recordings. It's why we got call display. We no longer answer any number we don't recognize, or anything that says "private number" or "unknown number." We also won't answer any of the 800# variations. The funny ones are when the display reads things like 123-456-7890 or 000-000-0000.

It took a while, but eventually the calls slowed down. Now we get about 2 or 3 a day. We don't answer. Our view is, if it's a legitimate call, a real person will be on the line, and they'll leave a message. If it's a recording, we don't even listen to it and delete it automatically. We frequently have messages with nothing but silence for a few seconds.

While I don't know anyone else that has been getting as many calls as we did for a while, this is a very common problem. I knew that, as soon as this became available, people would be eager to register. A system crash is no surprise to me at all!