A Victory for the little guy

Amid the overly hysterical and the reductio ad absurdum of the Savile case there was, tucked away off the front pages, a story which is much more likely to affect you and me. It concerns the single determined battle of one man who, fed up with numerous cold calls from auto-dialling centres decided to do something.

According to The Telegraph:

Richard Herman, 53, was so upset with firms phoning him up and trying to sell him goods and services he decided to charge them for the time they took out of his day.

He recorded the calls and then sent an invoice charging £10 for every minute he spent on the phone.

When they refused to pay up he sued them at the small claims court and won.

The marketing company AAC agreed to pay the full £195 for 19-and-a-half minutes of calls, plus a £25 court fee. 

If there is such a thing as abuse and scandal - quite overly used and cliched words these days - then this is it. What is remarkable is that he took them to court, or in this case, threatened to take them to court, and won.

We in this country are tired of all the little injustices which plague our lives; politically correct councils, over-zealous uniformed government agents and companies who use the lack of regulation or just ignore it. If there is one thing all of us agree on it is the need to clamp down on these call-centres and in particular the ones who generate silent calls ( a function of the auto-dialling systems they have). They plague our lives and are at least unsettling and at worst just plain scary. In terms of actual time-wasting and the volume of calls generated they are responsible for causing millions of disruptive moments in the daily lives of the population. Neither the phone companies or the rather useless Telephone Preference Service or OfCom have so far done anything effectual in ending the misery.

And that is why one man fought back. It is a victory for the little guy. For those who stand up to injustice it shines as a beacon of hope and encouragement.