Hacker News Reader

Comment by diegoperini | Hacker News Reader

Do not disturb is terrible if you are a part-time caregiver or on pager duty. No phone OS gives enough control over its settings and bad news often arrive from unknown numbers, i.e the hospital, 3rd party robot call service, friend of a friend etc. Speaking from experience.

View on HN

I have DND and the PagerDuty alerts are set to bypass it through the app. There can be improvements made but expecting your social graph to respect an assumed context has similar problems (not to mention due to spam I think most people screen/ignore calls from unknown numbers). I like iOS’s ability to share your DND state with your contacts but even that has challenges (eg people turn it off for privacy reasons real or perceived).

Why has the above (knowing how to properly use the devices that make their lives go round) become so rare?

I push the button that looks like an old school phone handset and punch in a sequence of numbers corresponding to another phone then talk to someone.

Is there a more proper way to use a phone?

I have mesages that can’t be linked to contacts on vibration during day (silent at night), messages from contacts on vibration during day (during night only the second message within of 15 minutes sends makes a noise), and phone calls always on loud.

That catches all unexpected emergencies without bothering me too much due to emails, IRC messages, or a random text from a friend.

A brute force solution would be a second (or third) phone for those situations

That seems excessive, because the only people who you give the second number to would be the people setup to bypass the dnd anyway.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com