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Comment by Waterluvian | Hacker News Reader

To those complaining about getting constant calls. This is fixable if you want to fix it.

1. Set up voicemail

2. Set to ignore all calls from numbers not in your phone book.

3. Resist the FOMO that they count on you being suckered into.

This is just a form of “you may have already won!” The Ned Flanders moment of “but what if it’s an emergency?” Emergencies don’t come from random numbers. Random numbers with legit calls will leave messages.

Take back control of your time. You aren’t thrall to your phone.

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>Emergencies don’t come from random numbers.

This is an absolute that just plain isn't true. For instance, out-of-state PD calling my sister-in-law from an unrecognized number to inform her that her sibling had died suddenly. There are numerous instances where an unrecognized number may need to contact someone for an emergency. I don't say this to disagree with the general sentiment of your post, but I do disagree with that particular statement.

In that example, would the person not have just left a message, “Hi it’s Name, please call me back right away”?

I just don’t understand how we got to a place where the way things worked for decades suddenly doesn’t work anymore. We would leave our homes and not be reachable. Most urgent calls aren’t actually “emergencies.”

>In that example, would the person not have just left a message, “Hi it’s Name, please call me back right away”?

Sure, but whether or not that suffices for someone is pretty circumstantial.

Like I said, I don't disagree with your general sentiment, just the absolute. And hey, change happens, c'est la vie.

That's partly true, but also sometimes that was a problem.

In the same way mobile phones shouldn't have to worry about working with emergency services numbers as before we had mobile phones we were still calling them. In other words: it is sometimes better to do things that weren't done in the past.

Doctors refuse to acknowledge the existence of voice mail. It might be some perceived legal/liability thing or maybe it's just a manifestation of their arrogance, but in my experience no doctor will ever leave a voice mail ever. I fully expect that if one of my relatives ends up incapacitated in the hospital and I'm their first contact, the hospital phonecall will go unanswered (not in my contacts list, so my phone won't ring) and I'll receive no voice mail or SMS.

If your relative ends up incapacitated, it won’t be a doctor who calls, it will be a social worker. They will leave a message. There are other situations that result in a person not being able to answer their phone: being asleep, being in a movie theater, being on an airplane, being in a tunnel, being on a camping trip, having a cell phone that malfunctioned, having a cell phone with a dead battery, being on another call when the call was received, being out of the country and using a local SIM…

Some doctors offices interpret HIPAA's privacy rule as not letting them release any information until they've verified the far end of the phone call by asking for your name and DOB. So VM is out. I've seen others let you specify on the intake form: Full voicemail OK? Y/N. Brief voicemail OK? Y/N.

Your second point is very interesting to me as someone born in 2000 who's only really known a world where this is true. It seems so distant and novel from where we are today.

> I just don’t understand how we got to a place where the way things worked for decades suddenly doesn’t work anymore.

You're making up a past that didn't exist. During the entire period where caller ID existed in the U.S., I can only think of a single person who screened their calls in the way you've outlined. (And that person also happened to screen calls from known numbers, too, so it doesn't really count.) Everyone else would screen obvious calls coming from toll free numbers (1-800, etc.), and just take a chance on the remaining unknown numbers. An answering machine/ringer could be turned off for special occasions, but that's no different than putting a cell in airplane mode or whatever.

In fact, there was an entire genre of comedy albums devoted to messing with incoming telemarketer calls during this period. Those albums wouldn't have resonated like they did if most people had been screening all unknown numbers.

How would picking up the phone made any difference here? The sibling is still dead. Finding out whenever you checked your voicemail isn’t going to change that.

The same goes for “But what if my kid is throwing up at school?” They’ll deal with it, or someone from your contacts will probably text you.

As a sibling comment said, this was our lives for the decades between when the telephone was invented and when cell phones became ubiquitous. I promise it’ll be okay if you don’t leap to answer every unknown call that lights up your screen.

>How would picking up the phone made any difference here? The sibling is still dead. Finding out whenever you checked your voicemail isn’t going to change that.

Sure, in that specific instance. But it doesn't have to be strictly for a death. Spouse gets into a car crash, or has some kind of medical emergency, where they're still alive but they're trying to get in touch with someone from the family to notify them of their whereabouts and current condition.

>I promise it’ll be okay if you don’t leap to answer every unknown call that lights up your screen.

I think you missed the part where I said I agreed with the general sentiment but disagreed with that specific absolute, but thanks for being a touch condescending.

> The sibling is still dead. Finding out whenever you checked your voicemail isn’t going to change that.

Maybe so, but my cousin passed away suddenly nearly 10 years ago and I was the one who received the call because his family was out of town.

The thought of missing that call because I had to disable unknown numbers because we live in a society that doesn't value privacy enough to leave people alone is really depressing.

The power of technology means anyone in the world can initiate contact with anyone else. Without a method to moderate initial contact, spam filters, ignore buttons, social etiquette, etc. our phones would ring continuously, our inboxes would get 10,000 emails per day, and our phones would chime continuously with push notifications. Spam is 99% of raw email traffic, and robocalls are a significant fraction of total call count. Nomorobo estimated 1/3.

>This is just a form of “you may have already won!"

If someone contacts you claiming you have won a prize, and it appears to be from a real but shady business (e.g. a car dealership), consider falling for it. The scam is most likely illegal and you may be able to collect. Your local government should have a consumer protection agency that can help you do so. Just keep your cool and document everything.

I've taken two car dealerships to court for this. It was fun and profitable.

Also, it appears the scam is illegal at the federal level.

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2022/01/...

I am not a lawyer. You should read your local laws.

How "profitable" are we talking about here? The time expense of going to court can be pretty high, but for a high enough reward, I'd consider "falling for" many things!

I got settlement offers of $500 and $1000, the amounts of the advertised prizes, before going to court. In the first case I got the offer as soon as the consumer protection agency e-mailed the dealership. In the second case I got the offer as soon as they received formal notice of suit. Filing the reports took me about fifteen minutes. Filling out the notice of suit took me about an hour, most of which was research.

I took them to court because the settlement offers contained clauses I didn't like. I could have recovered the money with less work. Going to court took an afternoon, most of which was spent sitting in a waiting room.

I think there's a non-zero risk that you'll eventually run afoul of local organized crime like this.

I own a business. What you propose isn’t really a option. People leave a voicemail, telling me to call them back. Even if I do so right away I almost always get voicemail. Even calling back 10 minutes later and then 30 results in…voicemail. If I leave them a message or text to call me back again the universe often chances it to be when I’m in the bathroom or driving.

It’s infuriating.

I can't speak for your customer base but, personally, I despise being called.

95% of calls from businesses are announcements rather than conversations. There is zero need to interrupt me in real-time to tell me my car is ready; it is not going to make me come any quicker.

SMS is far less invasive.

totally agree: asynchronous messaging fits the idea of maintaining momentum, for me anyway, and for most folks i know for decades.

As one of the people who calls with information like that, I would love to go to all sms. However, there are still a lot of people who never check their text messages. I've started asking all the customers if it's ok to text instead of call, and probably a third of them say not to text. These do tend to be older people.

I'm a photographer, and I largely agree. It can be annoying dealing with people who send short replies or who don't fully respond to whatever you emailed them though, so there is that. It's incredibly awkward sending a question twice in a row.

Very fixable but something about reading strategies for proper use of the phone makes me really angry. It’s on me to be on guard and suspicious at all times instead of using the phone to make calls and not thinking about it besides that. Every way I can communicate is out to get me!

100% agree. It’s ridiculous that we need to gatekeep an onslaught of people ringing our phones and doorbells wanting to sell us or defraud us.

When my doctor calls, I cannot get a call back through their system, I've tried, and I don't have a list of their outgoing numbers.

> To those complaining about getting constant calls. This is fixable if you want to fix it.

For people who are even remotely customer-facing their job involves answering calls from unknown numbers, so that's not a solution.

Biggest problem I see is if you’re checking your voicemail, you have to at least start to listen to every one of the scammer call voicemails if you’re going to catch the real ones. It’s tedious.

I have been doing this for years and it creates a steady stream of problems when people change numbers without telling me. The spam situation is so apocalyptic that I deal with these problems as the lesser evil, but it seems very weird to present this as a "fix" rather than a steep tradeoff that might work for some people.

I don’t follow the number change problem. These people wouldn’t leave a message?

Of course, but the interrupt semantics are lost, which is the problem. I'm not convinced that you actually live this, because if you did you would know this.

I tried that approach for a little bit. They ended up filling up my voicemail box within like 4 or 5 days.

Huh. I’ve never had telemarketers leave messages. Their system seemed to detect and give up.

If that’s what other people experience then yeah, this may not be a silver bullet.

I wonder if it depends on the pause in the voicemail automated reply. Their systems detect if someone is talking before connecting I believe, I pause before talking to unknown numbers and you usually get some white noise then it hangs up. Versus a real person who would probably say "Hello?!"

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