Comments on: On not answering the phone

By: GRA

GRA — Wed, 26 Feb 2020 05:41:38 +0000

Work phone during work I answer. Personal phone I don’t answer during work. After or before work, yes. Spam calls are rare. Spam texts are more prevalent, though they’re an easy delete away.

By: George

George — Tue, 25 Feb 2020 21:11:01 +0000

I’m completely phone-phobic. I tense with a jerk every time the phone rings. Just the disruption puts me in a state of panic. No, I’m not getting collection calls, nor have I ever. I dodge most calls from my brother and sister. Those calls especially drive me nuts. My wife handles the answering machine, and I do not have voice mail on my cell phone. I may, on a heavy-use month, use 10 airtime minutes. Please text or email. That gives me not only a record of what was said, but allows me to answer when it is convenient to me, and enough time to think through an answer – and I don’t have to listen to someone drone on and on about something I have no interest in. Just go away.

By: richf

richf — Tue, 25 Feb 2020 16:33:35 +0000

If somebody wants to get rich, they should invent an app which blocks every call that doesn’t have an actual human being on the other end of the line (Yes, I know that this won’t work, but I can dream).

I wonder about the economics of robocalling. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who didn’t just hang up on them, which means that they don’t make any money on those calls. Of course, they’re machines, so they don’t care about wasted time; but surely all of those calls cost something ?

By: Hangtown Bob

Hangtown Bob — Tue, 25 Feb 2020 16:03:41 +0000

I have always thought that ALL of the costs of a phone call should be borne by the person or entity making the call and not by the person receiving the call. If this were the case, I suspect that robo-calls and other junk calls would disappear.

By: OldTexan

OldTexan — Tue, 25 Feb 2020 15:31:08 +0000

I am an old curmudgeon, I am in my mid 70’s and retired and half of the time when I get an unknown number call I answer it and then hold on to get a real voice offering me an extended warranty on my car and other such nonsense, after mumbling some affirmative grunts for about 30 seconds I tell them I am really not interested but I like to take up their time just to annoy them. It kind of works and my robo calls have cut down way down.

As for that text stuff one daughter communicates almost only with text, the other answers the phone about half the time and likes text and my son will always answer my calls unless he it tied up on something else and then he will send a text saying he will call back and I try to avoid annoying them as much as possible. I also love the fact that I can talk without long distance charges and send and receive texts and photos of kids and grandkids.

We have come a long way in the last 50 years with communication since I spent three years in the late 1960’s as a morse code intercept operator in Europe copying hand sent morse code, the great fantastic pre 1860’s Civil War technology that held on the militaries of the world for a long time.

By: T Migratorious

T Migratorious — Tue, 25 Feb 2020 13:46:11 +0000

I, too, am a dinosaur but I have always hated talking on the phone. Being able to do things online has been a godsend to me.

At least 90% of the calls we get on our landline are spam. We never answer them unless (1) they are from someone in our contacts or (2) we are expecting calls from doctors or tradespeople. Family members usually text, email, or call cell phones. Three area codes in Texas (including ours) are the most frequently spoofed area codes. What that means in practice is that the spammers use a different fake number each time they call so they are impossible to block. All the more reason not to pick up.

By: JimNorCal

JimNorCal — Tue, 25 Feb 2020 12:44:30 +0000

RohanV’s comment is interesting and matches what I describe above. I wonder if this feature is auto applied to some calls but not others because this only happens, for me, on a few calls.
“Apple introduced a new feature on iPhones in a recent update which automatically sends any call from a number which is not in your contacts to voicemail.”

By: Jamie

Jamie — Tue, 25 Feb 2020 12:27:06 +0000

I have an odd relationship with phone calls: like sushi, I never want them, but once I’m having one I enjoy it. I love text because it puts me in control of at least my side of the conversational pace, and gives me as much time as I need to formulate an answer.

Of course, I am a long-winded texter. Very long-winded. There is almost no situation too complex for me to want to pick up the phone and talk to the other person about it. In fact, the only one I can think of recently is when two faraway friends wanted to discuss as-yet-unmade vacation plans with us, and we handled that via FaceTime.

By: texexec

texexec — Tue, 25 Feb 2020 05:10:40 +0000

I hang up immediately if it’s a robocall or a telemarketing call (like “is Betty there? ” “Or the reason I’m calling is that I’m with the Police Association…” ). We get 4 or 5 of those kinds of calls each day. I don’t care if it seems rude or not.

By: JimNorCal

JimNorCal — Tue, 25 Feb 2020 04:49:07 +0000

Just in the last couple of months I’ve started getting odd “calls”.
There’s no ring and the connections go straight to voice mail. It’s always callers who are making business-related offers such as “want to sell your house?”

This is not my doing, and I’ve not heard of how the caller can cause this to happen. At first, I assumed that I had inadvertently gone to “vibrate” no-ring mode but now it’s happened multiple times when I could confirm my ringer was on.