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Comment by Waterluvian | Hacker News Reader

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Waterluvian

You should be consciously aware of who might emergency contact you anyways. Add them to your whitelist.

Edit: all good points. Yeah I guess that is a risk.

Also reminds me of this:

https://youtu.be/J-inCB3POqs

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Yeah, because when your spouse is getting rolled into emergency surgery after suddenly collapsing you'll definitely know what number is going to call you to inform you, so you'll want to whitelist that one. And when a drunk driver hits her car on a rural road in the middle of the night and her phone is trapped in the wreck, you'll want to make sure you whitelist the phone number of the passerby that stops to help. And when your elderly parents' house is burning down (along with their phones) you'll definitely know all the phone numbers of all possible emergency responders and neighbors, so whitelist all of them too.

That's not even considering mundane everyday stuff like delivery people/repair people who got lost or have to reschedule last minute. You might have the main number for the business whitelisted, but those sorts of calls usually come from the phone number of the day's driver.

The only people who think "just disable incoming phone calls" is a viable option either have no friends and/or family, very little life experience, or both.

All the hospitals that I know disable caller ID. Which seems pretty stupid to me, they could set it to the number of the main switchboard.

There is usually a setting to allow unknown numbers through if they call again within a short amount of time. That may help with the emergency case.

Unfortunately the 2FA calls for my corporate login seem to come from different numbers each time..

I have that setting enabled, though I think it may be Android-only.

Do we know if people actually try twice in rapid succession often enough during emergencies, without special training to develop that habit?

I don't know the data on this, but I'd like to.

I would think the more likely scenario in this case would be to work through the list of emergency contact numbers (ie. cell phone, work phone, home phone) in succession rather than calling the same number twice.

That's a useless arms race because spammers can easily call twice.

You would think, but so far they don't seem to have figured that out.

The problem is unless you have a home phone, you already can't rely on cell phones to have every call come through. Calls do not connect all the time, and end up going to VM anyway.

If people want to contact me, they can leave a message on my voicemail.

The only people who think "just disable incoming phone calls" is not a viable option either have no decent friends and/or family, very little life experience, or both.

Will reverse-911 bother navigating your IVR? Will their automation leave a clear message?

I can tell you that calls from 911 don't come from the phone number '911'.

I haven received a single meaninful phone call in 10 years. yeah if its urgent, leave a message. Else you will not hear back from me.

You never know who's going to call from what number. Just yesterday I had a carrier I hired call me from the shipper's landline because the situation was going sideways and there was no cell service.

That's not really feasible. You might know for which persons you are the emergency contact but you can't possibly know from which phone you would be contacted in case of an actual emergency.

I believe the parent is taking about an emergency where the hospital calls, not the person.

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