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Comment by megablast | Hacker News Reader

If you have a kid and are ignoring calls, that is crazy.

You're right. How about we all try this? The next time anyone's in a meeting together talking about a production incident or quarterly planning or whatever, they're going to tell everyone else to STFU and wait while they take every random call they get on the off chance it's their kid's school trying to get through to them. Does that seem reasonable to you?

No, because it isn't reasonable. What would be reasonable is for the individual receiving the call to excuse themself leaving the rest of the meeting to carry on. Isn't this already the standard?

When over 95% of the calls you receive are spam, it's not reasonable to excuse yourself from meetings whenever you get a phone call.

I mean, unless you just don't want to be in meetings. Which is okay.

Well he’s 12, in the care of competent adults at a public school less than a mile away. But sure, I guess I should have been perfect.

I also have a 12yo (and three younger kids), and I have missed calls from school as well.

Maybe, but that's the world we live in now. If it's crazy, it's an inevitable sort of crazy. Get enough spam calls, and even if you know you might get a valid call from an unknown number, you'll find yourself treating them all as spam just the same. We really, really don't do well with repeated false alarms.

It's how our brains operate, and the fact that the spam keeps on coming just reinforces it. If the call is legitimate and time sensitive, you hope they'll leave a voicemail or, better yet, follow up with a text message.

Is there a word for describing becoming desensitized from false alarms? A similar situation is instead of a shared calendar for OOF status (at work) we are asked to send a calendar invite to our team and immediate team. My calendar is filled with “doctor appointment” invitations from people I don’t often interact with or need to know their in-office status. I started missing meetings and appointments because I was so desensitized from appointment reminders that were meaningless, I’d just ignore the notification because they were rarely valid. Since then I’ve tried automatically deleting out of office invites but they don’t always follow the same format. I’m apparently alone here because I brought this up as an issue and no one else felt like it was a practice that needed to change.

I've heard alarm fatigue used. I think it originated in a healthcare context.

I've also heard the term alarm fatigue. Pretty sure I heard it in the context of cybersecurity where security admins will get complacent if there's too many false alarms and potentially miss legitimate attacks.

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