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My wife does not answer the door when she's home alone. She called me at work yesterday morning saying there was someone ringing the doorbell over and over and over. The guy doing it had a hard hat on his head. There was no other identification she could see and no vehicle parked out front. He moved away from the front door and walked to the side of the house where the electrical box and phone boxes are located. The power went out and the security alarm squealed as it changed over to battery backup. We still had a land line connection but I told her to grab her cell phone, stand near where we keep our shotgun and call the police. She did and the police showed up within a couple of minutes. By that time the power was back on and the guy was next door talking to our neighbor George who works at home. After the police checked him out they came and told my wife he was legitimate; that he was a contractor for Oncor and had just installed a new electric meter. He had parked his truck at the far end of the block out of sight from our house.

A simple heads-up from Oncor saying meter replacement was going to be done in my neighborhood on Monday could have saved a lot of trouble. I don't know why companies don't do that these days.

RPB wrote:<snip>...checking city codes at http://www.municode.com/.." onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;.

Thanks for posting that website. I just spent a couple hours browsing through my city's ordinances. Learned a lot.

mamabearCali wrote:I am just wondering how one would know where a permit was required.

You could start with your city secretary's office. They should know.
Maybe you can use this: http://virginia.hometownlocator.com/va/chesterfield/

Things are a little different from the days of door to door vacuum salesmen. Heck my dad used to do that in the 1960's. Suit, tie, buzz haircut, clean shoes, and even a U.S. Army tattoo on his forearm, (covered up by the suit).

I don't care if the solicitor is young, old, fat, skinny, white, black, brown, tats, no tats, there is nothing that I need that gets sold door to door nowadays. I don't need to buy meat from a freezer in the back of a pickup truck. I don't need magazine subscriptions. I don't want financial planning advice. I give enough in taxes for anything school-related. My religious needs are squared away.

I've been told by a couple of different LEOs in my town to call immediately if I see someone going door to door without a city-issued permit with their picture on it hanging around their neck. My wife and I have called about every one we've seen. I don't need any stranger on my property while the wife is home and I'm at work.

I have a sign that I bought from Lowes that says No Soliciting. Since that didn't stop anyone, I etched a sign that hangs below it that explains what No Soliciting means. It also says ignoring the sign is a ticketable offense. I have no idea if that's true, but a LEO can work that out for them. Both signs together seem to work pretty well.

I honestly believe most of the people going door to door today have no idea what soliciting is. When I had just the No Soliciting sign I had to explain it more than once and have even gotten the reply, "Oh, is that what I'm doing?".