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Comment by armchairhacker | Hacker News Reader

> 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...

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> 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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

If someone is looking after my child, I have their number. I block calls from unknown numbers adn and some prefixes, and silence calls from numbers not in my contacts. This is pretty normal I think (because of spam).

I've only once had the problem that someone from the school used their personal mobile to call me and didn't get through, but I was already calling to let them know I'd be late.

There's no reason for parents to be able to contact you socially unless you invite it, but surely you should contact them from a school/shared number?

I'm suggesting this not for the sake of others, but for your sake. Given that people will block unknown numbers, I would think using a known number makes your life easier.

It seems odd to me than an after-school program has no set way for parents to contact the program without going through a relay-style process. I agree that the solution shouldn't be "give out your personal phone number," but it also shouldn't be "rely on a person that's not at the program to relay calls to you."

Put another way, how would a parent contact the program in an emergency? They'd likely (as you illustrated) go through an intermediary that may or may not be there. That seems less than ideal, and certainly wouldn't be something that I'd be happy about if my child were in the program.

Y'know, that's a great point. I actually don't know how things look from the parent's side--I can tell you for sure they don't have my number, but "Anna"'s number must be a business phone, as I know parents always have a number they can call.

Android has the option to ring if the same number calls within 15 minutes. I find it handy at least (though my robocall level is really low compared to the tales told here).

The authorities have no reason to be involved. It's 20 minutes, and children can take care of themselves.

At least 99.9% of my voicemails are a couple second long robocalls, but in the rare event of it being a genuine phone call, I get the google transcription of someone saying 'please call me back' on my watch and then I do so. Just because I'm willing to glance at notifications on my watch of incoming voicemails for an instant, doesn't mean I'm willing to talk to hundreds of robocallers per month. Its just too expensive.

Voice phone calls are dead, kid discussion would usually be handled via text or email. I don't really get phone calls about my kids. I believe the more corporate-type environments enjoy the written documentation provided by text/email as opposed to unrecorded undocumented phone call.

The era of always-on low-fi audio connections was very short. Just 30 years ago, parents certainly had no electronic tether and had a home phone number, maybe with an answering machine in later years. And now that technology is completely dead and unusable.

My kid is in CA, I am selling a house in AZ, and my wife is buying a house in GA. Most of my friends are out of state. Voice has immense emotional bandwidth advantages over any form of text. It definitely helps everyone in the stress pool maintain levity. I do prefer all business to be conducted through text formats (email preferred) though.

In the case in the GP, maybe a message would have worked too but I don't see the problem with calling.

That said, I get a lot of spam calls on my Fi phone but I simply don't answer if I don't recognize the number. Fi asks me if the number was spam and it's simple to give a brief scan of the transcript if there is one and tell it yes or no.

> Voice phone calls are dead

I am amused by this blanket assertion. It really depends on the age/type of people involved and the kinds of interactions they are involved in. I am 50 years old and work in both software consulting and run a tugboat company. I had to take over the tugboat company two years ago due to a death in the family. For 30 years prior to that, I was working almost exclusively in software. During the last couple of years before taking over the tugboat business, I had my phone set to do-not-disturb almost all of the time. In the tugboat business, that does not work at all.

For dealing with software people in purely technical matters, text/Slack/Teams is fine. I respect the needs of others who don't like real-time conversations. For doing business deals in software, I often end up having phone calls with decision makers.

For the tugboat industry, it is too fast paced and too much money is on the line in quick deals to screen phone calls.

Don't assume that everyone works the same way.

I'm guessing the reason you waited 20 minutes is because you know a call isn't a casual form of communication these days. I think people would say the norm should be that after 10 minutes you text the parents. In most case you will get a response sooner and if the didn't pick up you wouldn't be left wondering if something went wrong or they just dont pick up unknown numbers.

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.

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?

>> 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.

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.

> 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.)

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.

> 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.

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