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Comment by ghaff | Hacker News Reader

That's hardly a new phenomenon though. Back in the day when getting a phone call was arguably a bigger deal (and before there were answering machines), there were the people who were perfectly comfortable having sat down to dinner were not going to get up and there were the "Aren't you going to get that?" people.

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Definitely, although I used to be a "aren't you going to get that" kind of person back when a phone call was unusual. The frequency of "calls" now is just insane and the signal to noise ratio is now near zero, and that is what (I believe) has led to my change of philosophy.

I admit I don't get a huge number and very little outright junk. It was one of the things like made me mildly resistant for a while to get rid of my landline because I'm very selective about who I give my phone number to. Nowadays, for various forms requiring it, I just use a work number that I don't know how to retrieve messages from even if I wanted to.

I still have a landline (wife seems attached to it? It is a waste of money IMO). I remember as I child being excited when the phone rang, what if it is my friend calling? Now it induces rage as the calls are 98% scam calls.

I took the plunge when I canceled cable TV a few years back. It would be useful as a backup now and then (although my Internet seems pretty stable--my unassisted cell service is pretty poor) but not $40/month useful.

You can consider porting your landline number to a VOIP service (I use voip.ms) and after that it's nearly free. I bought a basic Linksys modem (SPA2102) so that we can still plug in our cordless phones in an use them normally.

As a bonus you can set up simple filtering so that you don't get many spam calls. For me, all calls that have an anonymous or 800 number in the caller ID get redirected to a voice prompt that asks the caller to press 9 to talk to us; all other calls just ring our phone directly. You could also use whitelists, blacklists, etc.

It's both better and cheaper than a regular landline...

Though being comfortable not answering doesn't mean you want to listen to the ringer go off for a while.

> people who were perfectly comfortable having sat down to dinner [and] were not going to get up

That's me with the doorbell.

You're leaving out the "uses the answering machine to screen" people

> (and before there were answering machines)

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