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Comment by orev | Hacker News Reader

All of my comment equally applies to people wearing Apple Watches on air. I have never seen anyone receive a call on one, or look at one and take some action. It’s still staged.

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Here's then Republican Presidential candidate Jeb Bush getting confused by a phone call on his watch[0]. Here's Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi getting a notification on her watch during the State of the Union Address a couple of years ago[1].

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4in1AUemxqM&frags=pl%2Cwn [1] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/why-was-nancy-pelo...

And Hillary Clinton getting a call from "the grandkids" during an event meant to appeal to moms. Totally not staged.

https://www.indy100.com/article/hilary-clinton-facetime-call...

I doubt it is staged. I'm not popular and I get 25 to 30 of these per day. All my calls are permanently forwarded to google voice. I check Google Voice every few days for important things.

I've made peace with the notion that if a family member dies I will find out a few days later, but I refuse to get calls from these people that honestly should have their eyes plucked out.

And what would be the benefit to ATT to stage this?

this seems a little extreme

Plucking their eyes out or forwarding all your calls to GVoice?

Not OP, but I'm just not willing to sell out my privacy just to deal with robocalls.

The eye-plucking, though, that I'm totally okay with.

GVoice

Coincidentally, I recently had a family member involved in a terrible accident and I was the first person called by the police officer (an unknown number) because I appeared first in my family member's phone (and I subsequently had to relay the news). As such, I don't care about robocalls because you really never know. Even if the probability is low, I'd rather be bothered in those situations. I just stopped caring about something that ultimately doesn't matter in the big picture.

Back to the point, I think it was staged, but more to illustrate the CEO also is getting robocalled. If he sat up there and just said it, who wouldn't roll their eyes and say "yeah sure". Without being in the right place, recording at the right time, there is literally no way to convey "I'm having this problem too", even then, there'd be skeptics.

I hope your family member is recovering, but if the police officer had not reached you from the officer’s phone, would they have tried calling you from your family member’s phone? Was your number in your family member’s phone tagged with an “ICE” (“In Case of Emergency”) or some local equivalent, so emergency service-folk know who to call, and could you green-list calls from their number?

More generally, what chances of a call being an emergency contact versus a spamming robo-call are people willing to accept? If I had a hemophiliac child, or an at-risk geriatric parent, I would be far more willing to accept all calls. Since I do not, I use a robo-call blocking service (Nomorobo, but any of several would do, if/until Stir/Shaken works.)

Unfortunately the phone's screen was shattered during the accident (made inoperable); I am unsure how I was the one contacted, though I doubt I was their ICE. I assume it was a simple "My first name starts with an A and we shared an uncommon last name". To that degree I don't really care, I'm happy we were contacted immediately.

With the scenario experienced, as I said, I don't really care about robocalls. There's that old saying about "If it won't matter in 5 years, don't spend more than 5 minutes getting angry about it". With that in mind, I just sort of filter out the annoyance. Yes, robocalls are annoying, but again, I prefer it over rhacker's alternative of finding out about important things later.

There were posts on here months ago about how Facebook had a pretty aggressive notification process for users that started leaving the service. I'd stopped posting on there shortly after the accident because my posts became more about my family's status - if felt cheap/dirty/not-right to then post about a meme or something silly. The notifications annoyed me, so I disabled social network notifications and generally "stopped caring" about these types of minor annoyances overall.

My point is that I agree that robocalls are annoying and, sure, I hope someone gets fed up enough to attempt to fix them, but in the grand scheme of my life and happiness, eh. If it happens, it happens, if it doesn't, it doesn't.

I just have my phone permanently on silent / no-vibrate. And I check it when I feel like it (e.g. when checking HN or other news, between meetings, etc.). And I redirect unanswered calls to google voice to get the transcription of voicemail as a text.

If you’re not required to be on call for reason or the other, I can only recommend this approach. No wasted time with robo calls and also puts some humility into your hot shot boss that thinks it’s ok to try to call you about whatever at 1045pm. ;)

If I happen to get a robocall when I'm not doing anything - say waiting on CI to finish - then I'll talk to them and make my way as high up the food chain as possible then tell them to take me off of their robocall list.

If enough people waste their time, then it should become a less profitable strategy.

Does it seem that this strategy is affecting the number of robocalls you receive? Does it appear to increase or decrease?

I am wondering if robocallers rate phone numbers based on their interactions and possibly share that data...

I've not noticed a change. I actually don't think my strategy would make a difference on an individual scale. But if widely deployed, I think it could.

What does being popular have to do with robocalls? It’s more likely they target people who pick up often. In that case, don’t answer the phone unless you know the number

Staged to what benefit?

Not everything is a conspiracy.

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