Before I say anything else, I must tell you that I am writing this in New Jersey, in the United States.

I say this because a bill floating through the New Jersey Legislature would require anyone who answered the phone in any non-emergency call center in our state to declare his name (it can be a fake one), the name of his employer, the state in which he is located and the country in which you would find that state. Whether offices deal with customer service, sales or collections, they'd all have to do it.

The impetus is that supposedly local consumer operations are subcontracting their call centers to foreign businesses. You call customer support for an operation in Pennsauken, you get rerouted to a call center in India. If you receive good service, so much the worse; you'll never even know something was terribly, terribly wrong. If you get bad service and see through their arrangement, you still may be seduced by the thrill of such international small talk as asking someone on the other side of the world what time it is over there:

“This is incredible. I've never talked to anyone in Calcutta before,” you say.

“You've never called your local public library – which has subcontracted its help desk to an office across the hall from us?”

“Oh. Well, then I guess I have. So what's it like in Calcutta?”

“Hot, humid, no one speaks English.”

“Wow. It's the same here in Newark.”

The problem is that, once the call goes overseas, you don't really know who you're talking to or what they might do with your personal information, said state Sen. Shirley K. Turner, D-Ewing, who is sponsoring the Senate version of this bill. Her legislative aide Albert Harris also pointed out the problem of losing these phone jobs to foreign countries.

So if this bill passes and someone answers the phone saying he's located here, you know he lives nearby and can be held accountable – or that it's still legal in India to tell people on the phone that you're in New Jersey.

For this law is not pending at the United Nations. It's just rattling around in the New Jersey Legislature. This may seem terribly unfair, but India tends to ignore the laws we pass in New Jersey. Of course, Iraq used to do that, too. You see what happened there.

Other loopholes exist as well. For one thing, in the bill's Assembly version (whose sponsors Linda Greenstein, D-Monroe, and Gary Guear, D-Hamilton, did not return calls by press time), a business doesn't have to abide by this law unless it has at least 25 or more employees whose main job is to answer the phone.

For another thing, according to the Assembly State Government Committee statement from early this month, the law is aimed at “inbound call centers operated by a corporation or any other entity doing business in New Jersey – which receive non-emergency telephone calls or electronic mail messages from residents of New Jersey.”

So, while a foreign call center does not have to tell you that you've reached Beijing, you don't have to tell your exclusively New Yorker clientele that they're talking to Gloucester City.

This gets back to why I told you right off the top that I am in New Jersey – and why this law is not an amazing waste of time and probably a nuisance as well. (Whatever else I may say about Turner, by the way, he's also co-sponsoring a bill to establish a no-telemarketing call list. So God bless her and all who dwell within her dominion.)

If I hadn't said I was in New Jersey, then for all you know, I could be subcontracting this job to a cheaper, more desperate columnist in Bangkok. But now you know that I work at a company where at least 25 people answer the phone all day and that I am in New Jersey – or at least I was when I wrote (or rewrote) that particular sentence.

Or maybe I'm in India, where we can say anything we want …