Hacker News Reader

Comment by criddell | Hacker News Reader

I average around 3 robocalls each weekday. They are annoying and it's made me set my phone to not ring when I'm at work.

Do you do anything other than hang up when you get a robocall?

Sometimes when I do answer a robocall I just ask them to hold on for a second while I get a pen and something to write on then I set the phone down and go back to work. They rarely stay on the line for more than 10 seconds and one Medicaid scammer calls often enough that he recognizes my voice and will tell me to fuck off and then hangs up immediately.

View on HN

> Do you do anything other than hang up when you get a robocall?

Yes, I don't answer in the first place. My phone may as well not have the "phone" feature, I think I use it less than once per month.

I have a rule that I don't pick up unless I already have them in my contacts. If they're not and they need to contact me, they can text me or send me an email, and I'll call back.

How do you handle deliveries then?

Never received a call for delivery, other than take out food which I'm expecting a call from. That would be an edge case.

Is this an apartment thing? I don't receive calls for deliveries. US, live in a house.

Yeah, delivery men usually call to ask if anyone is at home.

People are outraged when I tell them I have no phone in my house that rings.

I'm outraged by the idea of people responding to phone rings like Pavlov's dogs.

What about the case where a doctor’s office calls, then you have to call back, navigate the menus, stay on hold, then get sent to voicemail & they call back n hours later?

This is a really common scenario for me, so I have to leave the ringer on to avoid it.

I can send my doctor and hospital a message through a web portal in just a minute, and it works just fine.

My doctor has no web portal :(

Turning on your ringer is like staying home waiting for the cable man. It makes total sense. If you are always in this kind of situation all the time (on Android) you can star certain contacts and set those to ring. I do that for certain friends.

Unfortunately, it seems like my hospital has a pool of SIP numbers that get round-robin’ed. I was never able to whitelist them all.

I haven't had a phone in my house, or on my person, that makes any noise or vibrates for many years now. Honestly I find it rude when a phone makes any noise whatsoever.

I pick up and try to waste their time as much as I can, while working on some chore / mindless task. I figure every second I keep them on the phone is another second they're not scamming an elderly person.

Edit: I think my record is about one hour with the "social security administration".

I answer it and leave the call going until they hang up. I don’t say or do anything else. It costs me nothing and it wastes a bit of their time. It’s a tiny rock in their gears.

I often don’t answer but when I do I set them on silent. Most times it’s immediate hang up but occasionally (less often nowadays) I’d get one that would just sit there indefinitely. My hunch is this the scanner that finds numbers that answer.

With the car warranty people I would let them say their script and ask random (somewhat stupid) questions - I had a fake car/vin/address/name that I'd read to get through any of those questions.

Haven't gotten one in months though...

Hah. With some voice-to-text steps a LLM could talk to these callers for a while before they realized...

The car warranty people always hang up on me when I tell them I want an extended warranty…

…on my 1909 Stanley Steamer.

iPhones have a feature where it just goes straight to voicemail if the calling number isn't in your contacts. That's useful most of the time but I have to remember to turn it off when I'm expecting a call from the plumber telling verifying the service or something.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com