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Comment by toomim | Hacker News Reader

If your car gets stolen, and the police find it, they will call you from a phone number that's not in your contacts. If you don't pick up, you won't realize that your stolen car has been recovered a couple miles from your house, and if you show up there in 30 minutes you can drive it back home, but if you don't, the police will send it to a towing yard, which will require you to go through 24 hours of paperwork with the police to obtain a release and then pay the towing yard $1,000+ to tow and store your car.

If you live in an area of low crime, though, maybe it'll be fine not to answer phone calls from numbers that aren't in your phone.

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Man, that is the most edge case reason I've ever heard for answering anonymous calls.

It is. Unless you own a pre-2005 subaru.

Medical calls are another, strangers finding your lost stuff is a third. I'm probably forgetting more.

Biggest reason - voicemail. Most numbers have a mailbox limit, it's somewhat common to reach a number that has a full mailbox. Sure, you should be emptying your mailbox, but this still means you can easily drop calls if you haven't checked it in a while.

I answer every call. no matter what the caller ID. I'm a landlord I have hundreds of rentals. I get calls from police and detectives from blocked numbers sometimes from people that are frantically complaining about something that's very serious and requires my immediate attention to call police or to respond immediately.... I've had situations involving death where you know not answering the phone is not an option at least for me.

You are not me though.

Prove it.

How long does it take to listen to a voicemail and call them back? A one or two minute delay is almost never going to cause an issue.

Even in the highest crime areas the ratio of spam calls to legit and urgent calls is going to be thousands to one. You can cumulatively save a lot of time and annoyance by not answering all of those spam calls. I'm actually surprised to see this debated, I also stopped answering unknown numbers years ago and thought that was standard at this point.

I do not pick up the phone unless the caller is in my contact list. No exception (my phone does not even ring).

All other calls are routed to voice-mail and near-instantly transcribed. The message then shows up on my desktop and on my mobile phone. I can read it and respond to it as necessary.

How do you do this? Do you use a modern smartphone?

Not sure about the person you're replying to, but my Pixel 6 has automatic voicemail transcription. I thought there used to be an option to automatically send a copy to email, but I'm not seeing it now. Could probably use Tasker or any notification sync service to send it to your desktop.

If my car got stolen the last thing in the world I would do it take it back immediately.

Who knows what damage has been done to the clutch, or the engine internals while it was bouncing off the rev limiter for minutes at a time. Also I'll bet there is a lot less rubber on the tires than before, and probably all kinds of nasty stuff on the inside.

Heck no I'm not taking it back. That's insurance all day long.

I have different rules that take effect when I'm expecting an incoming call. Such as, I take my phone out of airplane mode.

In my experience, police officers leave voice messages.

I would expect them to leave a voicemail in this situation.

Okay, so maybe answer your phone when you're expecting an important call. But otherwise, probably safe to wait for a text or voicemail.

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