Show HN: escape from meetings, etc with a prearranged phone call: GetOutCall.com | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: escape from meetings, etc with a prearranged phone call: GetOutCall.com

getoutcall.com

83 pointsRoedou42 comments

This was my recent 'weekend project'. I have so may half-finished apps & sites, that I really needed to break the seal, and ship something. This was the simplest thing I could make, so here it is; it's definitely a relief to have something else 'in the wild'.

It's very simple: a flat HTML page for the front end; the back-end is Python on Google App Engine, using Twilio for the text messages and phone calls.

I'm more than open to feedback!

Excellent work. Congratulations on shipping. If I could find a good Twilio alternative for other countries I might do something similar for another another country.

Which country are you looking for?

They have their international beta program: http://www.twilio.com/blog/2012/08/twilio-launches-beta-phon... http://www.twilio.com/international

and this page seems to include a LOT of countries: http://www.twilio.com/voice/pricing

Was looking for Australia in particular. I was just searching for it and from the search results I thought they are not providing for Australia just yet but clicked on the link you gave me and seems like they actually do.

Tropo has Australian numbers. And 40 other countries. Has for years. http://tropo.com (disclosure, I'm the product manager).

But really, if all you're doing is dialing out, then you don't actually need a local number. Just use whatever service you want (us, Twilio, Plivo, someone else, etc) and set the caller ID to a local number or make the call as a blocked caller ID.

Ok - Awesome idea and project. I just tested it out and it worked great but I did have one bit of feedback.

To make it more realistic, you should let the call run a bit longer. For example, on my phone with the volume up in a quiet room you can hear the beep when the call ends. With this service the call ends quite abruptly. Perhaps let it run for a few seconds though I am not sure if this would incur any cost on your side?

Beautiful design, noticed a bug though, on iPhone: http://imgur.com/2nOJc (background image doubled).

Interesting, thanks.

Seems like I need a much wider image for the BG on mobile devices; I guess this is down to the very high resolution of iPhone screens?

Also, looks like the webfont character in the H! didn't work either.

Sweet.

Now you just need to grab a few more more domains, e.g. "EscapeMyDate.com", etc.

Alternate app: be an adult.

Is there an API for that?

I tried 'from adulthood import maturity' but keep getting the same error.

Yeah, but it's undocumented.

from __future__ import maturity

I did the same thing with a text message instead of a call a few years back: http://datebreaker.heroku.com/

It's almost ridiculous how easy twilio (and heroku) make setting up a project like this.

Edit: That said, I really like your design, and a call is probably a stronger social cue than a text message.

I guess I'm old school, but I've always been a bit taken back these days at how some people think it's okay to take phone calls during a meeting.

If you're being paid by your employer to attend meetings, what phone call could possibly be so important that you can't let it go to voicemail and you get to it after the meeting?

But I'm probably at least 10+ years older than the average person on HN, so maybe that's why. I still remember a time when people who took out a cell phone at a restaurant was considered rude and obnoxious, so I guess times do change.

  If you're being paid by your employer to attend meetings, 
  what phone call could possibly be so important that you 
  can't let it go to voicemail and you get to it after the 
  meeting?

Do you remember a few months ago when Amazon's EC2 had problems and took down Quora, Pintrest, Heroku and that lot? [1] Or when Knight Capital managed to lose $440 million in 45 minutes due to a software glitch? [2]

What meeting could possibly be so important that you can't postpone it to deal with a critical production issue?

[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/anthonykosner/2012/07/01/survey-... [2] http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/nils-pratley-on-finance/2...

Sure, there are some people that are important enough to warrant interrupting a meeting, but the vast majority of the people that I've seen that get up to leave a meeting to answer the phone don't fit in that category.

More likely, the problem is that people are dragged into unimportant meetings they don't need to attend.

I used to work in a very client-focused industry. Internal meetings, even those led by a CEO, were secondary to your relationship with your client. People would pop in and out of meetings constantly taking calls and following up on things.

My current company doesn't have a very big team or office space, but if/when I set one up that's the sort of culture I would expect. Mettings should be voluntary and secondary in importance to the work that you do. It's me talking after all, not a prophet.

I'm probably 10 years older than the average HN'er as well.

Client-serving is very different, and I'm sure a good CEO would insist that you take the call rather than be in a meeting. I was thinking more about from the developer angle, so I guess I should have been clearer.

Like I said below, interrupting a meeting and leaving to take a call from your mechanic because your car is ready, or from a friend to plan your activity that night, is rude, and I've seen a lot of that.

Missed this comment.

I still don't agree. I think it's important to realize people can't always separate their work and personal lives -- especially things like taking a call from a mechanic at 11:00am. I wouldn't expect people to make all of their personal calls at 6:01 every day since it's generally not practical. I say this from a management perspective where I used to be pretty demanding about attention. After a while I realized that sometimes your team has to take that call from their vet. I think letting your team make that decision for themselves goes a long way in building a relationship.

I kind of see it like this:

You're either in an "all hands" type meeting or a small group or two-person meeting. If it's the former then I think participation is completely optional as you're likely to get a recap from a colleague afterwards or via email. If it's the latter then you're likely to be a relatively important part of that meeting and the others can wait for you if you need to interrupt. Of couse that doesn't mean that you should take every call whether business or personal but I don't think it's a case of either/or. There are plenty of company-related calls that could be temporarily ignored and vice-versa.

> If you're being paid by your employer to attend meetings, what phone call could possibly be so important that you can't let it go to voicemail and you get to it after the meeting?

A family member is suddenly in critical condition in the hospital? Your spouse was kidnapped on a business trip and is being held for ransom? Use your pretentious old school imagination.

Obviously emergencies are an exception, but for the meetings I've been in, the phone calls that I've seen my peers take have never been an emergency. They are people taking calls from their friends, their significant others, their mortgage broker, their mechanic, etc.

The worst is when they start talking on the phone even before they leave the meeting room, and disrupt the meeting.

I love the idea in concept, but I hope people wouldn't actually use it. I'm not sure which I find worse: not being honest with your coworkers or having them judge you for not silencing your phone before a meeting.

Simpler: you set your alarm tone to sound like your incoming call tone, then just set an alarm.

Even simpler: take your phone out your pocket and pretend you have a call and it was on vibrate.

The call helps you perform the deception, though, by getting you "into character" for a phone call.

your background image is 1.4 mb. this one is 100 kb, no noticeable pixelation or artifacts: http://i.imgur.com/7bcsJ.jpg

Fixed; thanks.

PS: you wanna be my CTO? I think this things going to blow up. Obviously you'll have to work from my garage with no pay for a few years, but you'll get a huge payout when we exit.

You can do it with an API call too: http://www.fakecall.net/

This is also very easy to setup via a ifttt.com recipe. That is how I have done it in the past.

Another idea: "helpIamInAMeeting.com" (or something, didn't check domain) where you can post a cry for help from within a meeting and other employers can hire you away on the spot by calling you.

How're you affording this?

Also: there's a great business model here....

I sell advertising space in the outbound phone calls to someone like a dating site. "Hi, here's your excuse to leave if you want. But next time, use SomeOtherDatingSite.com to find a better match!"

See, it's a foolproof plan.

It 'only' costs four cents per use, thanks to Twilio. (1c per inbound/outbound text message and 2c for the call.)

I'm fortunate to be able to put a bit of cash into a slush fund for giving away things like this for free. (I have other free apps that are costing me a LOT more to run, though still in Beta.)

Excellent site! Very clean looking and I'm sure it will prove useful, even though there are other methods of doing this. I love that you let us text just "1h20m" and the like. I will be showing this to many of my friends.

nitpick: Background repeats in y, so footer background is the top (hair) when window is long, which doesn't flow and makes the footer unreadable.

Thanks, I'll fix it.

I'm not a developer; I knew there'd be mistakes creeping in all over.

(Out of interest: what's your screen resolution? The image is 1180px tall.)

2560x1440

deletes trolling comment here

Good execution, I like it.

Thanks! There were other ways of achieving this, but I went for a solution that didn't require installing apps, learning APIs, creating accounts, etc.

Great work! I'm inspired.

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