Every once and awhile I get nervous that I'm missing something important but the few times I have given in and answered an unknown call it is always unimportant (car warranty companies, comcast, etc).
(He ended up surviving ventricular fibrillation with no organ or brain damage because they got an AED on him within a minute.)
Some hospitals are stricter about cell phones than others.
Anecdotal, but I now get complete "text message coverage" for all incoming calls.
Which isn't really useful beyond getting them to only call once every few months instead of once every few days or whatever.
Everything but political crap and surveys seems to go like this, answering a call and saying no firmly ends that stream of calls.
For the surveys I answer and ask how much they are paying people to take the survey. Then when they say they aren't paying I say I'm not interested and hang up. My hope is that this is superficially annoying for the person doing the survey. Not antagonistic, just enough to remind them exactly what it is they are doing.
I believe you but I can only say that your experience is different than mine. Very different. My experience is that it seems to encourage them to call more often.
Until you hit 200, anyway.
My z3 doesn't. I'm running marshmallow. Where are you finding the option? On previous phones long pressing the contact gives you an ignore option but not this one.
Edit: I just discovered the option to send all calls from a contact to voicemail which is great but then I'll have to dial in and delete the voicemail otherwise there will be an icon there forever. Ideally there would be a button to dump the call and silently reject all further calls from that number. I suppose I could attach all numbers to the same contact.
- Don't answer private numbers ( where i don't see the number)
- Don't answer unknown numbers on landlines ( except Android lookup a business name and says which one -- then i handle it depending the bussiness)
- Pick up depending a mobile or landline. If it's a landline with our city code in front. I pick up. If it's not ( or from a big city), i don't pick up. If it's a mobile phone, chances are to big it's someone who referenced me.
Had no junk calls, except one. Where a telemarketeer seemed to use a mobile number... Which was akward
If it's important enough that someone needs to get a hold of me they should be having a human calling that can follow through with that simple request.
We get a LOT of people who do something similar to you, or just leave their voicemail box full, or don't bother to set up voicemail at all. Then they get angry at us: "Why didn't you call me to let me know my system was finished?" "We did, and you didn't answer." "Oh, I don't pick up calls from random numbers." Well, I don't know what to tell you, then...
I can't text you, because we don't have a business cell phone to text with. Yes, I suppose I could set up some fancy integrated-with-our-POS system to text you from some number that we could then read replies to, but that both would cost time and money to develop, and would open up yet another vector for us to be contacted by (we already have a phone number, Yelp messages, Facebook messages, and email as it is.)
We can (and do) email customers, but email presents its own issues: People like to reply to them and we don't always have time to respond quickly, and people don't check their email often, or it goes into a spam filter...
It's not just us. It's your doctor, your pet groomer, anyone who has a local business. My suggestion here is to pick up calls from your local area code, and/or program into your phone the businesses you do business with.
Text messaging with or without email is easy to access online[0] and no longer required an ancient "business line" - you don't need to "integrate" it into your p.o.s. POS either. If you have fb, then there's surely no reason other than will that you can't use SMS.
[0] for example, https://www.twilio.com/
It's worked so nicely since I got it, I'm surprised we ever did without it. I think it also auto-disconnects calls from numbers that a sufficient-amount of people have flagged as spam.
The only problem it doesn't solve is when a business decides to do it's surveys/telemarketing through the same number it attempts to contact clients on. This is especially rife with SMS spam, where they use the same number to SMS you valid "updates" that they use to send promotions/ads and other spam.
This only weeds out lazy robocalls, I get plenty of calls with (presumably spoofed) caller id from my exchange. It would be trivial to add that into a spam script.
You can set up a virtual number to receive incoming - and so do 2 way email - SMS, and (not sure this applies in the US) if you don't need 2 way can spoof your number to show text alert instead, eg the text shows as from "1Up Repairs".
In your position it definitely sounds worth exploring. There's a lot of other places than Twilio too.
One last hint, if they're "too cheap" they'll be using grey routes and should be avoided like plague.
When a business, local or otherwise, asks me for a phone number I regard it as a spam-vector and decline. It's the businesses that need to adapt, not the customer.
A phone number is a very personal piece of information given the intrusion it permits into one's life, and many people are hesitant to share it with one-off requestors for that reason.
Why aren't you tweeting 'job #3327 complete'?
I really only communicate via phone if it's scheduled in the calendar.
Edit: Oh neat! Apparently it's illegal in the US, but legal in Canada (where I am currently located). So it's not the robocall not bothering, it's it being flat-out illegal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caller_ID_spoofing
I still answer most calls from my area code, but if I suspect it's a robocall I just pick up without saying hello. If it's a robocall, there's generally a lengthy pause and then you can here someone connect (at which point I hang up).