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> It's gotten so bad I just don't answer my phone unless it's a call from someone I know I have my phone set to silence calls unless they are in my contacts li

> It's gotten so bad I just don't answer my phone unless it's a call from someone I know I have my phone set to silence calls unless they are in my contacts list. I tell people this whenever I give out my phone number. Honestly I think this should be the norm. There's no reason for a random stranger to need to call you, if they want to reach out they can text or email, and I can't imagine many urgent situations where they can't text, can't forward the message through anyone in my contacts, and can't directly get the authorities to contact me. The only exception is automated phone calls (e.g. call from a random number for an interview or to confirm 2FA where I can't do SMS), in which case I have to temporarily disable silencing calls. But systems where you get called once from a random number and can't call back are really awful for other reasons...

res0nat0r 4y ago
I get tons of spam calls and texts, but I really never see any of them anymore. I'm on Android and Googles distributed spam detection is really working great. I'll get a notice sometimes that I got a txt moved to spam but most of the time I never see these, and it seems to also block all robocalls too and they only go straight to voicemail. I probably have 15 voicemails right now I never knew came through because they're junk and auto-blocked.
ipython 4y ago
That worked until my son was hit by a car, and my wife in her shock had no idea where her phone was. I’m still to this day guilty that I didn’t pick up the phone the first time it rang. The truth is that this problem will kill the telephone system and honestly if this is how the telcos treat it, it deserves to die.
- SoftTalker 4y ago
  What did you have to feel guilty about? You could have done something for your son, remotely, that wasn't already being done?
  - stonogo 4y ago
    This is utterly bizarre. Why are you inventing conditions the parent poster never mentioned? For all you know they were on a different floor of the hospital, unaware they could have been comforting their child had they but known. Why go out of your way to be an ass about someone else's trauma?
    - tablespoon 4y ago
      >> What did you have to feel guilty about? You could have done something for your son, remotely, that wasn't already being done? > This is utterly bizarre. Why are you inventing conditions the parent poster never mentioned? For all you know they were on a different floor of the hospital, unaware they could have been comforting their child had they but known. Why go out of your way to be an ass about someone else's trauma? Some people have tenuous connections to humanity. In this case, a failure to understand anything surrounding a loved one's accident, other than the provision of physical care. I think that's somewhat more common with tech people, due to how some idealize aloof "rationality" to an extreme.
  - renewiltord 4y ago
    When I was in the ICU, the hospital went down my emergency contacts and failed to get a pickup until they dialed my dad. The people who were my emergency contacts were good at handling the process and simplifying things for my parents once they found out (shortly after my parents) but they felt some degree of guilt for having failed to have acted. There are decisions to be made in these situations - notify work, transfer health information, ensure payment stuff is in order, notify people. It's much nicer to have someone handle all of these things. And, in the end, I think people would have liked to have seen me before I died, should that have been my fate. And that takes flying out of wherever into wherever.
mcculley 4y ago
> There's no reason for a random stranger to need to call you I get a lot of calls from people for whom my first introduction/interaction is a phone call. I make a lot of money and otherwise get a lot of value from some of these interactions. Some are completely bogus telemarketer calls, of course, but I find that being reachable is still valuable. I have learned how to filter out the most obvious telemarketers. I hope that my competitors ignore unsolicited calls. (This depends on industry and role within an organization. Certainly people who never have to interact with strangers can screen calls. But don't assume this is true for everyone.)
tristor 4y ago
> I have my phone set to silence calls unless they are in my contacts list. My ringer is always silenced, I get notified to calls because I have notifications for calling enabled on my watch. I should consider disabling notifications altogether for calls not in my contact list.
Wowfunhappy 4y ago
> I have my phone set to silence calls unless they are in my contacts list. [...] Honestly I think this should be the norm. There's no reason for a random stranger to need to call you I teach an after-school coding class. Some weeks ago, the parents of two children didn't arrive at pickup. After 20 minutes, I called the parents using the phone number listed in my company's system. The parents confirmed they were running late due to extenuating circumstances and were now ten minutes away. I think this was probably better than involving the authorities?
- powersnail 4y ago
  Presumably, had silenced call be the social default, the parents would have added your phone number into their contact list on the first day of school, sort of like how you have to add someone on a chat app to talk to them.
  - crooked-v 4y ago
    Or they would have seen that there was an actual message left and called back. That's how I tell the scammers from actual calls 95% of the time - the scammers never leave a voicemail.
    - dpkirchner 4y ago
      I wish that were the case for me. Most calls and most resulting voicemails I receive are from scammers. It's frustrating because all we'd need is some way to trace calls back to source providers and then let us apply client-side filtering akin to UBlock Origin. Easy.
  - Wowfunhappy 4y ago
    Parents do not, as a matter of course, have my cell phone number. It's fine for a few families to have it (because e.g. I had to call them), but if every parent in the program was able to message me at any time of day, I think I'd have a problem. Now, there are other ways this could work. My company has a "director of client services"—let's call her "Anna"—and all parents have Anna's number. So I suppose I could have called Anna, and Anna could have called the parents, and then Anna could have called me back to relay what the parents said. It just would have taken longer. Of course, Anna is occasionally sick / on vacation / otherwise unavailable, in which case there's a second person—let's call her "Vivian"—who I can reach out to in an emergency. We're an after-school program, so we're not set up to have a centralized office phone, but I guess parents could add Vivian to their contacts as well. But I'm happy I was able to just call the parents.

res0nat0r 4y ago

I get tons of spam calls and texts, but I really never see any of them anymore. I'm on Android and Googles distributed spam detection is really working great. I'll get a notice sometimes that I got a txt moved to spam but most of the time I never see these, and it seems to also block all robocalls too and they only go straight to voicemail. I probably have 15 voicemails right now I never knew came through because they're junk and auto-blocked.

ipython 4y ago

That worked until my son was hit by a car, and my wife in her shock had no idea where her phone was. I’m still to this day guilty that I didn’t pick up the phone the first time it rang. The truth is that this problem will kill the telephone system and honestly if this is how the telcos treat it, it deserves to die.

SoftTalker 4y ago
What did you have to feel guilty about? You could have done something for your son, remotely, that wasn't already being done?
- stonogo 4y ago
  This is utterly bizarre. Why are you inventing conditions the parent poster never mentioned? For all you know they were on a different floor of the hospital, unaware they could have been comforting their child had they but known. Why go out of your way to be an ass about someone else's trauma?
  - tablespoon 4y ago
    >> What did you have to feel guilty about? You could have done something for your son, remotely, that wasn't already being done? > This is utterly bizarre. Why are you inventing conditions the parent poster never mentioned? For all you know they were on a different floor of the hospital, unaware they could have been comforting their child had they but known. Why go out of your way to be an ass about someone else's trauma? Some people have tenuous connections to humanity. In this case, a failure to understand anything surrounding a loved one's accident, other than the provision of physical care. I think that's somewhat more common with tech people, due to how some idealize aloof "rationality" to an extreme.
- renewiltord 4y ago
  When I was in the ICU, the hospital went down my emergency contacts and failed to get a pickup until they dialed my dad. The people who were my emergency contacts were good at handling the process and simplifying things for my parents once they found out (shortly after my parents) but they felt some degree of guilt for having failed to have acted. There are decisions to be made in these situations - notify work, transfer health information, ensure payment stuff is in order, notify people. It's much nicer to have someone handle all of these things. And, in the end, I think people would have liked to have seen me before I died, should that have been my fate. And that takes flying out of wherever into wherever.

mcculley 4y ago

> There's no reason for a random stranger to need to call you I get a lot of calls from people for whom my first introduction/interaction is a phone call. I make a lot of money and otherwise get a lot of value from some of these interactions. Some are completely bogus telemarketer calls, of course, but I find that being reachable is still valuable. I have learned how to filter out the most obvious telemarketers. I hope that my competitors ignore unsolicited calls. (This depends on industry and role within an organization. Certainly people who never have to interact with strangers can screen calls. But don't assume this is true for everyone.)

tristor 4y ago

> I have my phone set to silence calls unless they are in my contacts list. My ringer is always silenced, I get notified to calls because I have notifications for calling enabled on my watch. I should consider disabling notifications altogether for calls not in my contact list.

Wowfunhappy 4y ago

> I have my phone set to silence calls unless they are in my contacts list. [...] Honestly I think this should be the norm. There's no reason for a random stranger to need to call you I teach an after-school coding class. Some weeks ago, the parents of two children didn't arrive at pickup. After 20 minutes, I called the parents using the phone number listed in my company's system. The parents confirmed they were running late due to extenuating circumstances and were now ten minutes away. I think this was probably better than involving the authorities?

powersnail 4y ago
Presumably, had silenced call be the social default, the parents would have added your phone number into their contact list on the first day of school, sort of like how you have to add someone on a chat app to talk to them.
- crooked-v 4y ago
  Or they would have seen that there was an actual message left and called back. That's how I tell the scammers from actual calls 95% of the time - the scammers never leave a voicemail.
  - dpkirchner 4y ago
    I wish that were the case for me. Most calls and most resulting voicemails I receive are from scammers. It's frustrating because all we'd need is some way to trace calls back to source providers and then let us apply client-side filtering akin to UBlock Origin. Easy.
- Wowfunhappy 4y ago
  Parents do not, as a matter of course, have my cell phone number. It's fine for a few families to have it (because e.g. I had to call them), but if every parent in the program was able to message me at any time of day, I think I'd have a problem. Now, there are other ways this could work. My company has a "director of client services"—let's call her "Anna"—and all parents have Anna's number. So I suppose I could have called Anna, and Anna could have called the parents, and then Anna could have called me back to relay what the parents said. It just would have taken longer. Of course, Anna is occasionally sick / on vacation / otherwise unavailable, in which case there's a second person—let's call her "Vivian"—who I can reach out to in an emergency. We're an after-school program, so we're not set up to have a centralized office phone, but I guess parents could add Vivian to their contacts as well. But I'm happy I was able to just call the parents.