I receive about 20 spam calls per day. In contrast, I receive about 0.2 legitimate calls per day.
Google itself suspects that these are spam calls, because it pops up a bright red "SUSPECTED SPAM CALLER" warning when the phone begins ringing. And yet, I have found no option to have the phone automatically decline the call. There's not even an option to silence the ringer for any call not from my contacts; I actually had to disable my ringer for all callers, by default, and then manually, one at a time, set a custom ringtone for each of my contacts.
This is completely absurd. Why is it so hard to configure my phone to only allow my friends to interrupt me at any moment of the day, rather than any rando? Turns out, I might also hate telephones.
Strangely enough, given Android's comparatively-customizable nature, I think this is an area where iOS does it better? (Others might correct me.)
iOS 10 added "call blocking" as an app-type, which lets you choose apps which can filter phone calls for you. They can flag calls as possible-spam, or completely block them. (See [1] for Hiya's options screen, as an example.)
An "only ring for my friends" feature is sort of possible. You can keep your phone in "do not disturb" mode, and add people who you want to be able to call you to your "VIPs" list to let them through. That's a fair bit of manual management, though, which is a pain.
I don't think it's possible to make a call-blocker app which functions as a whitelist, sadly, because I think this is like their browser content blockers and operates as the app providing a list of blocked numbers for privacy reasons.
Hiya exists for Android as well and has very high ratings [1]. I have used Android since v3 and you have been able to change the dialer to a custom app for at least that long.
You have also been able to limit ringing while in Do Not Disturb to starred contacts only, or even just "contacts" to eliminate the need to manage it like you mentioned [2].
Informative, thanks! I admit a notable chunk of my reasoning there was that the OP couldn't find a way to do it, so it probably wasn't built in. (I haven't used Android seriously in the last 5 years or so.)
I have my phone set to "Do Not Disturb" and it allows me to define that only starred contacts or regular contacts are allowed to get through. Given that most people I know rarely ever call I think it's a sane enough config setting. I have an Android Phone, more specifically an LG G5. No app required in my case, it's just hidden in the settings.
Spammers use a spoofed caller ID with the same first 3 digits as your phone number so it looks like a local number sO blocking them by number doesn’t really work.
I agree with you. I've tried to block each one of them for maybe months, but nothing's changed. I still get at least 2-3 calls each day from them. I think ignoring them is the best option for us now, or if you would, just answer their calls, ask their company name, and sue them because of their multiple calls. I just read about this at http://www.whycall.me/news/my-4500-payday-from-a-telemarkete....
Even pre-smartphone landline systems could block (or route direct to VM) numbers with blocked caller ID.
You absolutely can block such numbers in the stock Android phone app; some online sources indicate iOS lacks this basic feature, but I don't know if they are accurate and current.
That doesn't exist in the latest version of the app. If I go to Settings->Call Blocking it's just a button labeled "ADD A NUMBER" plus a list of blocked numbers. The ADD A NUMBER button triggers a popup with an input field that only allows phone numbers.
Can't. You can block individual numbers, but there is no tool in the base Android to block all unknowns. Fortunately there are plenty of apps which will do exactly that - but I'm confused as to why I need to install an app to do something so simple.
The solution someone suggested elsewhere in this thread is to use make the default ringtone silence, then assign audible ringtones to all your contacts.
The problem with Hiya as I understand it is that it is limited by CallKit list size. I'm not 100% sure of this, but I think Apple's implementation requires a fully offline call list so that your phone calls are not sent to a public server and could be logged. This means that the number of phone numbers that Hiya can call spam must be downloaded ahead of time and loaded into CallKit. What I see often is that a phone number will not be flagged as spam, but if I query the number through the app later, it will correctly show it as spam. Someone correct my if I am wrong, but I think this is the problem.
Even if the number changes every time? The common pattern lately is a number with the same leading six digits as my actual phone number, followed by a presumably falsified last four digits. As far as I know, these are randomly generated.
> I don't think it's possible to make a call-blocker app which functions as a whitelist, sadly, because I think this is like their browser content blockers and operates as the app providing a list of blocked numbers for privacy reasons.
There's only 10,000,000,000 phone numbers, not even eliminating area codes that don't exist. I wonder if iOS will break on that...?
> I don't think it's possible to make a call-blocker app which functions as a whitelist, sadly, because I think this is like their browser content blockers and operates as the app providing a list of blocked numbers for privacy reasons.
Oh, that must be why the AT&T Call Protect app fails to block spammers the first time they call me. Always wondered about that.
This isn't exactly what you're asking for but on Android: Settings > Sound > Do Not Disturb > Allowed in Priority Only > Calls From Contacts Only (or Calls from Starred Contacts Only if you really want to lock it down).
Optionally enable: If the same person calls a second time within a 15 minute period, allow it (might allow someone really trying to reach you to get through, might also allow a spam caller through).
I tried this on iOS and it doesn’t work well because it turns off all other notifications.
While calls do get through from your contacts, you don’t get notifications for anything.
I really just want a contacts whitelist, but since that isn’t an option I use nomorobo which is a subscription service that works really well to block spam calls for $2/month. It’s an iOS app, focuses on not uploading your stuff to their servers, and doesn’t collect your call logs.
I have an s7 and I star every important number. I use use IFTTT to enable DND automaticaly at 22.00 and disable it at 8.00. Is very convinient. I can also filter an app for example whatsapp to pass DND and ring.
The best option I've turned up for most phones is:
1. Set a custom default ringtone.
2. Choose a silent wav file for this.
3. Assign a custom non-silent ringtone for selected known callers. (The ability to assign ringtones by groups helps here.)
Agreed that the situation is insane. I've stopped carrying a phone entirely, for this and other reasons. I can be reached, if necessary, by other means.
It also turns out that AT&T's chief lobbyist's contact inforation is available via FCC filings, and the number listed rings through to his voicemail. I've taken to letting him know about the spam phone call problem.
Instead of blocking the spam calls, it connects a bot that ties up the caller in a pointless conversation for as long as it can. I'm sure this would result in the telemarketers removing you from their lists themselves.
I implemented a system similar to this, where callers would be automatically given an explanation of not wanting to be called. After that they were put on a direct line with Rick Astley’s best hit.
It also customizes the message by looking for the caller number on spam services, and greeting them. At some point, I stopped receiving unwanted calls.
Unfortunately it doesn't work that way, the ones that DO give you the option to be 'do not call' will forward your number to other spammers, actually increasing the spam calls you get. Do not ask them to put you on the d-n-c list!
Here's what does work (in my experience): answer the call, but say nothing, heck, mute your phone mic if you have to. Just give them silence. I'm not sure if there's some 'person on the other end' detection algorithm or what, but I went from 10-15 spam calls a day to 1 every few days. It took a little while, but it worked. Just don't answer strange numbers with a 'hello?', if someone's trying to reach you, they'll usually say it first.
I like to answer the phone, say “please hold” then put my headphones up to the phone. This is great because it triggers whatever automated system they have to get active callers on the line, and wastes the time of a real human, who might realize what’s going on and prevent the system from calling my number again to begin with.
> Here's what does work (in my experience): answer the call, but say nothing, heck, mute your phone mic if you have to. Just give them silence.
I don't get that many spam calls, but what I do when I get one varies from answering and immediately hanging up to doing what you suggested (which usually results in them disconnecting after about 5 seconds). Occasionally, I've done things like answering the call and snapping my fingers in the receiver instead of saying "hello" and that usually results in an immediate disconnect.
I'm not sure if any of those things have affected the volume of spam calls I receive though.
I used to work in tech at a call center and that would confuse the auto-dialer software. It's designed to know a person and designed to know voicemail. But just silence is a new one! Good strategy.
> Unfortunately it doesn't work that way, the ones that DO give you the option to be 'do not call' will forward your number to other spammers, actually increasing the spam calls you get. Do not ask them to put you on the d-n-c list!
Anybody legitimate that's not true. But it's so easy to spoof your number that there are a lot of bad actors.
Are you talking about internal Do Not Call lists or the actual Federal Do Not Call list? Because I used to have that issue with credit card companies, random loan spammers, and such with both mail and phone call spam. I signed up for the list with a 100% opt-out option and just like it promised, within 3 months, the offers stopped coming in.
That being said, I also try to be pretty careful about putting my phone number out there, taking time to judge when a real phone number is needed or not, and asking pretty specifically for what reason a company wants my phone number and often just ignoring the service if an adequate reason isn't given.
Since I've moved abroad, I have apparently been less careful and I occasionally get calls and texts on my foreign sim, and I must have given my email out as there are suddenly lots of hot-singles looking for me, but it is 100% related to my current region, whereas before my Spam folder sat untouched.
Both really. Companies face fines if they keep calling people after they request to be put on a do not call list so it's a big deal. That's how I remember my experience at a call center anyway.
Hey this is exactly what I do! Answer and then mute immediately. Any real person will just say "hello?" and the bots get confused and just hang up (and don't call back). I get 1 spam call every 2 months maybe.
You can file a complaint with the FTC but with the volume of calls and Caller ID spoofing it's probably more trouble than it's worth. Every now and then some operation gets taken down and fined but it's rare.
Consider yourself lucky to never gets calls of this type. Between the out and out scammers and pollsters/political calls/charities (the latter categories are protected from landline junk call bans), I routinely get 3 or 4 a day.
In practice... there's some groups who are still allowed to call you even if you're on the registry. Others will just ignore it, and filing a complaint is difficult.
I added all my numbers to this list a year or two ago and shortly after the spam calls started. Even on numbers that are not publicly used. (I have Google voice as my primary number and it calls my mobile number and a voip desk phone. Now all three get spam calls. I had them for years and the voip and mobile numbers were previously clean. )
I posted this elsewhere in this topic, but my experience with the Federal Do Not Call list was the exact opposite - they promised "within 3 months the calls would stop" and sure enough, within 3 months I never got another call.
Fair, I just checked and it looks like my number was already in the registry when they started getting worse a few years ago. (so adding it again probably did not cause the increase) You can use the site to see if you are already in, and when you were added. one of my numbers was added long before I had it.
The internet myth is that it doesn't work but all you have to do is answer and ask them to put you on their do not call list.
Not give them a big tiresome speech about how they are breaking the law, just ask them not to call anymore ("Please put this number on your courtesy do not call list"). They actually don't want to waste their time...
It's interesting that you assume it's a myth. I can personally attest to answering spam calls, politely asking to be added to the do not call list, and still receiving calls from the same spammers over a period of months. Eventually I just downloaded a call blacklist app.
A lot of the calls I used to get were the ones where they spoof a phone number that has the same first few digits as yours to make it seem like a local number and then the caller is a scammer “You owe money to the IRS”, “Your computer has a virus and you have to pay to fix it”.
Which makes them easy to spot if you get a number from a far away area. The only calls I get from my phone's area code are misdials or spam, but my doctor's office stands out without a whitelist.
Man i should get you to talk to my spam with that magic +5 robot charisma.
Unfortunately, it still won’t prevent my number from being spammed. There is no human to talk to. Any indication you are alive is a confirmation your phone number is worth calling. The only thing you can do to convince them is not answer or somehow communicate a likely disconnection from a human.
So have you tried the approach I am advocating for a meaningful amount of time, say a week or two, or are you just sure that it won't work and thus avoid it because you are worried that you will do things like confirm you are worth calling?
A lot of the spam calls I get are just recordings or they just hang up once I pick up. Hard to imagine it would help to just say "please add me to your do not call list" into the void...
I also receive a lot of those (around ~5 a day, for more than 5 months already). It is really annoying and makes me wish I could just block numbers on my phone.
That you had some luck being removed from some legitimate call lists does not mean that you can dismiss these extremely common tactics as "Internet myths." There's a whole spectrum of spam callers that ranges from respectable businesses all the way to outright scammers. Some use illegal tactics like the ones you're trying to say are a myth and literally everyone I've ever talked to in person about the issue has had a similar experience.
The illegal tactics aren't what I am calling a myth. It's the idea that asking illegal callers to stop doesn't work that I am calling a myth. Even scammers are concerned with efficiency.
I mean, I get ~1 unwanted call a week across a couple of phone numbers (that I answer and ask to stop). Other people are saying that they get a dozen a day and giving up on their phones. My anecdotes work for me.
Many years ago I used to take the time to put the calling number into a ProComm script for a modem to dial repeatedly every 3 minutes for several hours, if they were toll free to me (expense to the original caller). I had way too much time on my hands then...
> There's not even an option to silence the ringer for any call not from my contacts;
It's called Do Not Disturb, with Allow Exceptions, Calls from My Contacts Only. Android has it, and iOS does to (I think the options are even similarly named.)
> Why is it so hard to configure my phone to only allow my friends to interrupt me at any moment of the day, rather than any rando?
It's not that hard. EDIT: or maybe it is, because phones are complex devices with opaque UIs with poor discoverability. But the information is out there.
You can install apps on Android that you can fine-tune what happens when a call is incoming.
I set it up to immediately hang up any private numbers and not report a missed call, set it up to hang on up non-private numbers that are not in my address book and show a missed call, and it lets everyone else through who is in my address book.
Since doing this I couldn't be happier. I can't remember the last time I got an unsolicited call.
I don't have voicemail because I don't know how to set it up to have a recorded message that doesn't accept voicemails. I'd like to set it up so that I can say 'you can contact me on this email address' but not accept a voicemail message, then it'd be perfect.
The people who need to be able to contact me are already in my address book. Everyone else can send me an email.
Blocklist plus (app) on android totally solves this problem. Anything from either an unknown number or from something not in your address book gets routed directly to voicemail (doesnt even show up on your screen).
I recently switched my main phone to IOS and it is by far the feature I miss the most.
I've had a similar experience with the spam calls. I don't get quite as many per day, but ~90% of the calls I receive are spam. I just don't answer my phone anymore unless it's my wife, my mom, or one of my brothers. I direct all other calls to voicemail after grumbling about being interrupted.
I haven't found a good solution for auto directing spam calls to voicemail beyond using Do Not Disturb from 8 pm to 7 am.
I recently bought a land line phone because mobile reception in my house was terrible and attending work meetings was troublesome. One of these days I start getting spam on the landline and then I realised there is no "reject" or "silent" button. I had to pickup a call to reject it which seemed like a chore in the age of mobile phones.
I think that depends on the phone model. I recall owning a cordless home phone years ago where you could just hit the Hang Up button without answering first.
I receive a similar number of spam calls per day and have turned off my ringer entirely as a result. At first I used a feature that enables the ringer for the second call from the same number in a short period, but then the calls started coming in batches of 3 (usually all from the same number, but always from the same area code and prefix).
May be not much convenient depending on the phone software, but you may consider setting default ring to something less noticable and/or demanding than “friendly ringtone” that you can set to selected contacts. There is also “don’t distract” mode afaik, with an ability to list contacts who can do it anyway.
I am not a lawyer, but if you can figure out who is calling you, I believe you can file a lawsuit against them for violating the TCPA (Telephone Consumer Protection Act), which carries statutory damages of up to $1,500 per violation.
That doesn't seem like a great idea. Like, one time my wife was hospitalized and they called to tell me. I think I would have been upset with myself if I didn't receive that call because I had installed an app to kill all calls from numbers I didn't recognize.
I've certainly thought about it (if anyone wants to suggest one they use, feel free), but I'm always held back by wondering whether or not those apps aren't simply yet another phone-number harvesting operation selling to spammers. (The fact that it would initially seem irrational to target people who are going out of their way to block spam callers would first require the entire notion of spam calling to be rational to begin with.)
They don’t store your contacts in the cloud and access to contacts is even optional (though they won’t be able to block spoofed ‘neighbor’ calls if you don’t give access, but they can label them).
They also market themselves as focused on privacy and they charge a $2/month subscription.
I haven’t gotten a spam call since I’ve used them.
Truecaller harvests all your contacts and sells them to third parties like sync.me (huge reverse phonebook). You should look up a few of your contacts’ numbers in there.
The problem with Do Not Disturb mode is that it blocks all notifications, too, right? I've turned off every type of notification except the ones I want (just Google Hangouts, since I use it for work). So, I can choose to either have a phone that rings (which I never want to happen for anyone I don't know) or Hangouts that doesn't.
I will have to look into third-party apps. I never really considered it, as I use Google Voice and want to keep using it, and didn't really think about it maybe being possible to use Voice plus something else that deals with calls...it seems like Voice is already too intrusive to inject more stuff in there (my calls are already delayed by as much as a couple of seconds coming in and out because of Voice; seems like more would just guarantee that I can't answer legit calls before it goes to voicemail).
But, I do need to sort it out. Recently I've been getting multiple calls a day and have resorted to leaving my ringer off completely. My mom worries, though, if I don't answer for a while.
Instead of ignoring those I usually answer and hang up to avoid the missed call notifications, clearing it, getting a VM notification a few second later, clearing that, then deleting it. Lately the callers have been calling right back too. It's really a lot of work. The worst thing is, I've had one false positive spam detection, it was from my bank and it was important, now I'm a little nervous to do the answer/hangup thing.
Do you have T-Mobile? The Spam Caller thing is actually a feature they implemented a while back. You can set the system to block such calls, but the FCC wouldn’t let them automatically block calls without user permission.
That was an unexpectedly dramatic story. With his Patton-like determination and complete unsubtlety, he was very lucky that didn't get uglier! I was really afraid for him by the end...
I strongly suspect it's your carrier preventing google from filtering these calls. I have google fi and it filters spam automatically (suspected spam at least disables ringer)
If you ever move. Make sure to go to the Post office and fill out the change of address there. If you do it online you are required to grant the USPS permission to sell your phone number.
I recently moved and immediately found the number of spam calls increase drastically. From 1-2 a week to ten a day.
What they do is notify companies that already have your address of your new address. So (for example) your phone company and your magazine subscriptions are told of your new address.
Just curious where you got this information? I did it online a few years ago and iirc I was able to opt out of all the spammy 'covienience' services offered by USPS affiliates
From the USPS directly. I recently attempted to do it online and that was not an option available. I emailed them regarding that and was told I should fill out a card at the post office.
"Exclusive Mover Savings
Get instant access to over $750 in valuable coupons
Safe and Secure
Safeguard your information with ID verification by a simple $1.00 charge to your credit or debit card
Speed and Convenience
Save a trip to the post office
Email Confirmation
Receive an immediate email confirmation of your Change of Address
MyMove.com Local Information, Tools and Offers
Make your move complete with catalog forwarding services, neighborhood deals and more at MyMove.com"
Privacy Policy excerpt:
"(e) to mailers, if already in possession of your name and old mailing address, as an address correction service. Information will also be provided to licensed service providers of the USPS to perform mailing list correction service of lists containing your name and old address. A list of these licensed service providers can be obtained at the following URL: http://ribbs.usps.gov/ncoalink /documents/tech_guides/CERTIFIED_LICENSEES"
^that returns a 404 for me
With a big blue "Agree and Continue" button... I certainly won't be entering my phone number in that form.
I will assume phone number can be considered part of "address" but it's unclear.
I don't hear, so I don't phone. However some business is almost impossible to conduct without phoning. AWS requires identification by phone. Customs tried to call me to ask me something about my bike I sent home from a holiday abroad. Credit cards are only unblocked by a phone call. And so on. (And phone relays are only a partial solution because some commpanies deem them insecure - I have currently a credit card I was not able to unblock, I will send them a cancellation notice.)
So, in other words, it's not hatred or perhaps an anxiety disorder, but a real discrimination of a disability, which leads me to agree with Mr Fisher.
Interesting. You don't use TTY devices then? I wouldn't be entirely surprised if those became less prevalent as telephone services decline in popularity, but I'd figured most of the deaf community used them still.
I don't understand this question. You mean, are AWS, the credit card institution and the customs also using TTY devices? Sorry, no.
And since texting (mobile short message service) TTY slowly went out of use, at least here in Switzerland. I still own a TTY device, however I haven't used it for more than ten years.
An interesting technical tidbit here: My TTY is using V.21, however with only one channel and with 110 baud. I researched the TTY with recording on a sound card and analysing the tones. Bit 0 is represented by a sinus wave of 1180Hz, 1 by 980Hz with a duration of 9.1ms each. A byte was transferred with 10 bits (total duration 91ms), 1 bit was a stop bit and the other one a parity bit (I am not sure, I forgot some details). Additionally there was a carrier tone at 1080Hz which was held for about 3 seconds after the last byte has been sent.
This means it was not possible that both parties simultaneously send. We had a convention that the other party is allowed to answer when we type two asterisks.
A phone relay service in Switzerland still continues to use this convention in their JavaScript application. It is a simulation of the old TTY device they sold to people. I think they had to use websockets because every letter is sent to the other party right away.
My changed relationship with the telephone became weirdly apparent when I watched the original WarGames movie recently.
There's a scene where David (Matthew Broderick) is alone with McKittrick (Dabney Coleman) in his office being interrogated separated by an office desk. While they're sitting there the telephone on McKittrick's desk starts ringing, which he silently ignores keeping his eyes glued on David, who grows increasingly uncomfortable as the phone keeps ringing and going unanswered.
I recall when that movie first came out there was a terrible tension in the air because nobody ignored a phone back then. Leaving it to just ring away felt wrong and unacceptable. Now whenever a phone rings I mostly just go "ugh" and feel no obligation to get to it at all.
As I watched that scene again I felt nothing of that original tension. I wonder how that scene would effect younger people today watching it for the first time?
part of the difference is now a phone belongs to a person, whereas then it belonged to a house, or in the case of the scene you're talking about, an office. i can keep track of who matters and when to expect a call if all i have to think about is myself, but even with just a couple people living with me i can't just ignore a phone call. i don't know if one of the people i live with is expecting a call. and with phones tied to places instead of people, you get calls like, "have you heard from so and so?", or "is my kid at your place?", which would be really shitty for me to just ignore.
I came into existence quite a bit after that film did, but I just watched it for the first time two weeks ago and the phone going unanswered definitely made me quite uncomfortable. Excellent film.
> If I were rich, I would have a permanent secretary.
If I ever play and win the lottery this is the one thing I would spent big money on. No expensive cars, no expensive wine, just a person which takes care of everything.
Need a new insurance for the car? Tell the secretary to do it. Car is broken? Tell the secretary to take care of it. Need a hotel? Tell the personal secretary to book one. Phone broken? Just send an email "Please order me a Samsung S8" and it will magically appear the next day. Don't like it? Just tell them to send it back.
This would solve 95% of my daily struggles and it would improve the quality of my life way more than any expensive yacht or car could ever do.
In fact if you have a group of half a dozen people who each pay a few hundred $ a month you could almost employ one person who takes care of such stuff even as a not-so-rich person.
> if you have a group of half a dozen people who each pay a few hundred $ a month you could almost employ one person who takes care of such stuff
You could move to Singapore, where a full-time (24x6) "domestic helper" costs about 400 USD per month. They'll cook meals for you, help care for your kids, buy groceries, do laundry, etc. Some people I know say they'd never move back to the US because of this.
For comparison, that cost is roughly 15-20% of typical rent.
The number of people I know who would trust their domestic helper to do the kind of things the OP mentions is pretty low. They're maids, not PAs, and they are not generally here because of their outstanding educational attainment and bright career prospects back home. Most of them can hardly speak English.
On the other hand, I've known a few young people in Indonesia and the like who really would make excellent PAs of the kind the OP desires, and their salaries are not much more. We're talking university graduate, excellent English and phone manners, and the kind of proactive dedication to a task that one greatly desires in an employee - $500/m or less. I agree, there could be a market.
In general this doesn't work out as well as you would hope. In many cases (financial, medical, legal) another person can't trivially act as your agent. (I.E. your secretary can't do it for you)
I think the very wealthy handle this via specialists with specific licensing, but I personally had no luck going the virtual assistant route.
Do you really want to grant an app power of attorney over you? That's like adding yourself as a co-signer of a loan. If they mess something up, it's your problem and "they should have know I didn't want that" isn't usually considered a valid reason to undo anything.
After reading this, I just started experimentally sending all calls to voicemail. Here's how I set it up; it should work with GSM phone carriers:
- Dial the below number. It'll show a bunch of information, including your voicemail number. Remember/copy the number.
*#67#
- Create a new contact. I put "Phone Off" in the company name field. Use the below number as its phone number, replacing the "X"s with the number from the first step, including country code. Calling this contact will tell the network to forward all calls to voicemail without the phone ringing.
*21*+XXXXXXXXXXX#
- Create another new contact. I put "Phone On" in the company name field. Enter the phone number below. Calling it will cancel call forwarding.
##21#
I added both of these contacts to my favorites and can tap them to enable/disable calls. Right now, I'm only planning to turn off forwarding when I'm actively expecting a call. It turns out that my phone puts an indicator in the status bar when forwarding is turned on, which is cool. Let's see how it goes.
Awesome, and I bet with pinning of contacts to home screen this could easily be used without ever touching the phone app. Also would be cool to use tasker to increase integration with multiple triggers or timeouts.
I’m probably a bit the other way in that I get frustrated with text messages going back and forth and back and forth when a one minute phone call will sort everything out far more efficiently. Probably also has something to do with hating tapping away at tiny virtual keyboard on the phone, too.
My teenage daughter seems very reluctant to make a phone call. Watching her try and organise something with her friends drives me a bit spare as it involves hours of waiting for poorly worded, ambiguous messages on Facebook or texts, with me suggesting several times, “Why don’t you just call them, and get it all figured out right now?”
On the other hand, watching my Dad buy a new mobile phone is really fun. The salesperson is trying to up-sell him on all the features of a phone, “You have unlimited texts, and it has an app to make you taller, and…” and my Dad just keeps asking, “Yeah, but can it make phone calls?”
I guess I fall somewhere in between.
I do find, when there is a scene in a TV show or movie where someone’s phone keeps ringing incessantly and they keep cancelling it while trying to have the deep and meaningful conversation with someone wanting to yell, “Don’t you know how to turn your phone off?!”
I do hate voicemail. Not so much leaving them, but having to check them. Probably because I hate any “interactive” system that involves sentences like, “To hear a list of all the ways technology has improved your life, please press one…”
Unsolicited calls to mobiles is not a big thing in Australia (yet) so I’m lucky there.
On the home line, I have an old analogue modem to pick up caller ID information for incoming phone calls using NCID[1].
When a call comes in:
* Automatically pauses the music player on my PC.
* Looks up the number in my address book, and displays the information on my screen. Also sends to the two Kodi/OSMC servers, for people watching TV.
This assumes it is not on my block-list. If it is on my block-list of known scammer and telemarketer numbers then it as automatically answered with a recording of the “This number has been disconnected…” message to try and trick them.
I don’t have to remember it or write it down - it's already written down.
Also I have a feeling that a lot of the "have a meeting" guys are the same that will try to tell another version of what was said in the meeting.
You aren’t sure even with text though - at some point I had an ex-colleague telling me what I had written, so I found the actual mail that proved my version.
I agree, I really dislike the move to everything by text. Text has it’s place for communication (HN is a perfect example) however it is far easier to work through something even remotely complicated with voice instead of text. We speak much faster than we type, we can add inflexions and tone to convey meaning in a way that text can’t (although emoji help) and, most importantly, there are no typos when talking.
My job requires interacting with lots of people, be it customers, suppliers, investors I can easily interact with 100 people a day who are not onsite and by mid afternoon I look forward to those I can deal with on the phone - even just for two minutes as it’s a break from typing. I often thank suppliers for calling when I answer as I know it’s a chance for some wider bandwidth communications that won’t require numerous back and forths.
I can understand being able to discuss a complex issue over voice, but can you explain how this is possible?
> it is far easier to work through something even remotely complicated with voice instead of text
I find that this is the exact opposite. Trying to explain an error message (or have an error explained to me), or providing numbers, a name, an address, etc. is always a nightmare on the telephone.
"I'm sorry was that a 'e' or a 'z'?"
"Was that a 9 or a 5?"
Maybe it's just a bad phone connection where we can't hear each other properly. But even in the impossible crystal clear reception circumstances:
I find that when typing the way to get through things quickly is to anticipate there responses and try to head them off in the initial email unless you want it to become and endless back and forth of one line emails and this is very hard to do.
I speak much quicker than I type so (250-300 wpm vs 50-60) as do most people so the communication happens a faster.
Finally, it is much easier to convey meaning and feelings g with tonality, non-word sounds (hmmmm, argh, a laugh etc) and then when negotiating tactical silences.
I was trying to renegotiate our payment terms with a supplier last week and while I knew we couldn’t get what we really wanted (even though every other supplier gives us those payment terms) I felt we could get an improvement over the current deal. So I rang their financial director, he asked some clarifying questions to my request (that I couldn’t have easily anticipated being the o my ones he would ask) he said no, I hmmmm, reiterated the problem at our end and implied switching supplier at the end of the season, he hmmmm’d, tried to deflect and when it was my turn to talk I intentionally stayed silent, he waited a few seconds and then filled the awkward silence with an offer of different payment terms that are halfway to what I really want and much better than what we have. If this was done over email he would never of given us the new payment terms as the text medium is too limited for this kind of negotiation.
Oh and when reading our letters just use the phonetic alphabet, much easier.
I’m not saying the phone is perfect t for everything but it is an important part of our cumminication options and is bette than text is an number of sutuations that the OP and many other commenters are ignoring in tech’s need to not talk to people in real time.
I’m 30, a millenial, the FD in question is in his 50s. It wasn’t social engineering it was negotiating to improve my businesses trading position - something that HN’ers should appreciate.
I’m also an engineer with a PhD in electronics, code regularly and run a factory. All this is to say that I’m not some sales/business development person who is clinging on to an old medium, I’m a business owner using the right tools for the job.
> “Why don’t you just call them, and get it all figured out right now?”
Because it's rude. It has always been rude, but now with the phone in your pocket it's that much worse. She doesn't know what her friend isn't doing at the moment, and shouldn't impose.
The featured article gives a better impression of this than I can... but I'll add that the tragedy of the commons is a factor.
You can't just show up from outer space and scream out of someone's pocket whenever you want. This will hopefully be a fleeting technological phenomenon.
In the 70s/80s/90s it was very common to get phone calls (on landline phones) at all times of the day from family members or friends.
I remember being on the phone to friends from school for hours in the evening, I don't even recall the subject matter of the conversations but it's just what you did.
Then as more and more people got on the internet, using other communication mediums like IM, IRC email etc became more and more common, and nowadays I'd find it very unusual for someone to call me out of the blue.
That's better but it's still kind of imposing. We are not socially wired to be compatible with the technology to magically steal people's attention from space.
If you don't want to be bothered, just turn off your ringer and notifications. Don't try to invent non-existent social norms. Part of the reason I have a phone is so people can reach me.
That's how new social norms come into the world. Often, they get invented in response to technological change. For example, prior to answering machines being widespread, the norm was to never ignore the phone ringing. After, it became OK to ignore the phone if it was inconvenient to answer because if the call was important, the caller would surely leave a message.
Now there's a push to normalize texting to see if it's a good time before calling, at least if the call isn't urgent. I support this: it's a very minor imposition on the caller's time and reduces interruptions when the callee is busy, as the content of a text can be checked at a glance.
Sure, but now you see why it's easier to text: you might not be able to reach a person at that moment. That's why it takes your daughter and hour to organize things, because the people she's organizing with are busy for the hour.
>Because it's rude. It has always been rude, but now with the phone in your pocket it's that much worse. She doesn't know what her friend isn't doing at the moment, and shouldn't impose.
You have to understand people originally got phones so they could be contacted which is in direct contradiction to your assertion "It has always been rude". Actually no it was originally desirable. A whole unwritten social etiquette sprung up around use of phones, in fact, because some people could be rude or found certain behavior rude. But people got phones because they wanted that medium.
Certainly when cell phones first sprung into existence some of those social contracts changed due to the cost and the fact in the US the recipient paid for the call and there were no unlimited calling plans. It could be considered rude keep someone on the phone then they're paying anywhere from 25 cents to one dollar per minute to speak to you.
When texting first came into play each text could be 10 or 20 cents each. Again, sending excessive texts would be considered rude.
Social norms have changed over time and I really don't know anyone young or old who shares your view that they consider any phone call an intrusion no matter the reason.
through the 80s and 90s I never felt a sense of rudeness to call someone. If they didn't want to be bothered they'd let it go to their answering machine.
it's only since texting became a thing that it started to seem more rude to call but like others have said we just ask "ok to call?"
Texting to ask if it is okay to call is, IMO, annoying and rude. A phone that can take texts has caller ID and voicemail to near certainty, call me and I'll decide whether or not to accept the call.
Don't make me deal with a content-free exchange to get to the one with content.
I've moved to the "Just make a phone call" camp after hating phones for many years. I still don't really care for phones, but getting stuff done is often much quicker when you call someone. If given the choice I would drop Skype and other online calling services, they're still no where as reliable as telephones and always a hassle.
My preferred communication means are: phone, email and everything else could disappear and I wouldn't care. Really, everything is just a poor implementation of the phone or email.
> I would drop Skype and other online calling services, they're still no where as reliable as telephones and always a hassle.
Counterpoint: I travel a lot, mostly between the US and Europe and use different SIM cards and therefore phone numbers in different places. Half the people I want to talk to at any given time would have to make an international call, and don't necessarily know where I am and which number to use.
My Skype and Google Hangouts usernames don't change though. Even apps like Signal and Whatsapp that use a phone number as an identifier (which I HATE) continue working the same unless they need to be reinstalled. Sometimes I don't even get a local SIM card and those apps still work wherever there's a Wifi connection.
There's probably some global roaming thing I could pay through the nose for, but it isn't important enough to me to be that easy to reach.
I'm always glad when someone calls and I always call people instead of typing down thoughts. Even better than calling is meeting someone IRL, but of course that's not always feasible. Then I usually begin by telling him or her how grateful I am that somebody is choosing the direct way over some form of texting and there are, sadly, far too many. Like your dad, I wouldn't buy anything not specially designed for transmitting voice in an analogue fashion. Too few options there, recently... Most of the people I communicate with are aware of this, thank goodness, but it's always hard to tell new acquaintances that I don't use Viber, Whatsapp, Facebook and even reluctant to use SMS.
I enjoy meeting people IRL but cannot stand the phone.
Don't you find it inconvenient to be interrupted by the phone?
Sometimes I'm in a bad mood or deep in thought and it's just not a good time for me to get into communication mode.
Then there is always the awkwardness of ending the call.
Talking on the phone effectively sucks a lot of my energy and causes anxiety afterwards. It's a non trivial event.
I'd much rather see the person in person where we can communicate properly and with full attention and the time to properly do so.
But some people seem to be able to effortlessly answer the phone and switch their train of thought to deal with whoever it is without skipping a beat. I envy that ability.
I used to had a phone phobia just as bad as described by the author, including spending nontrivial amounts of time going to places to ask a brief question to avoid a short phone call, etc.
My phobia was cured when I got a girlfriend who liked talking on the phone, plus we were away from each other most of the week so it was a good idea to do so. So if talking on the phone gives you anxiety and you would rather not have it, talking to a loved one might be good therapy.
However, I still hate phones (as in phone calls, not smartphones and their wondrous apps) for everything but personal communication with close friends or relatives. I hate how phones bluntly and suddenly interrupt anything you're doing, how you don't necessarily know who is calling, how you don't see the other person's face and how they require to answer now.
When I was younger I seemed to be in a minority for hating phones, but we seem to grow more and more. I look forward to a world where we can conduct any business by email, text messages or, in the minority of cases where it's really needed, previously agreed Skype calls.
I recently had to spend a lot of time on the phone to set something important up. It was a very frustrating experience.
I would call them, and be met with a robocall. The robocall would not really have a section for what I actually needed to do, so I would stumble around and often end up at the wrong person. Often we were both confused and it wasn't clear what was going on.
Every time I called, it's a different person. I have to tell them my contact information and details every time. There's no continuity from previous discussions.
Sometimes, the phone would cut out, for a reason I still haven't figured out. Often in the middle of me talking to someone, and since there's no continuity, all that time is now lost.
I had different people tell me different things at the same phone number.
I end up with no record of my conversations, so it's hard to go back later and say: "Hey, they told me to do X, but it didn't work".
Holds, holds, holds. When I finally did a phone call that fixed everything, I spent about an hour and I was bounced between 5 different departments, including one case of being bounced in a cycle. Overall, I had to call this company about 5 times.
I don't hate phones per se, I like talking to people on the phone if it's a productive conversation for both of us. But I absolutely hate the idea of figuring out something important or receiving a service via a phone.
By far the worst phone call experience I've ever had was with Washington Health Plan Finder. You can still experience it for yourself by making a call now. It's a never-ending loop of holding followed by mind-numbing options and random hangups. If you get lucky to speak with a real person, the level of incompetence will drive you to the brink of insanity. I swear, they just let random people walk in from the street to take calls because those people have zero idea what they are talking about. My experience ended in me cancelling all of our insurance policies with Kaiser because I was stuck in a beaurocratic nightmare that had me transferring from one institution to the other in a never-ending loop. Somehow NOBODY was able to help me. I was so fed up with this situation that I moved countries half way around the world.
At this point, I have to assume that it's deliberate at some level. There is so much low-hanging fruit for improving the customer experience that it's no longer plausible to me that most call centers have that as a genuine goal.
I used to work as part of the helpdesk for a large company a few years ago. Calls that never made it to a live person were considered "solved by the phone-tree". Everyone there knew that 9/10 of those were people who just got too frustrated with the phone tree, hung up and tried to call back again. It's all about padding those reports.
There's no excuse for lack of continuity nowadays, though. The callcenters I know have software to create tickets where the operators write the details of your request. Next time you just need to provide your client number or other ID to continue where you left of.
Just because there's no need doesn't mean it doesn't happen. Yes, this is a solved problem, but companies don't like using those solutions. They'd rather you punch in your id number into a phone tree, only to be asked for that same id again as soon as a human starts talking.
You are correct that there is no excuse, but companies still do it all the time.
I hate telephones too, and I DON'T have an anxiety disorder please!!!
I'm just not the guy always ready for a call. I rarely pick up the phone or open the door for a unknown call, and yes it can create stress. Quite often I am very focussed and balanced, one call can ruin that state. If you cannot find yourself in this, please don't create a disease out of it.
I used to hate them to a phobic degree, now I just hate them. I really dislike how much people are dismissing this. If I hated spiders, people wouldn't say "Oh you're just covering up an anxiety disorder".
Hang on - people aren't dismissing this as trivial; they're saying it's a common phobia (which is a form of anxiety disorder) and that there's good news: phobia is very treatable with a short course of therapy. That's freely available in England with short wait times.
Sure, but why should you treat it if it is not a disorder?
I think it is more a design issue with phones (than it is a phobia like for spiders).
Or rather: It is more a situation like if phones also happens to spew out huge spiders all over you in addition to letting you communicate remotely, and people get phobia as a result.
Why should I accept being woken up in the middle of the night for spam? Is this good design?, should I be "treated" to accept it?
Why should I be available 24/7 all the time for work? (design for PTSD?, more treatment yay...)
How come I can't use a secure medium to communicate to banks, or other services. (completely insane way to communicate securely)
The real insanity here: Forcing all people to use ancient remote voice communication and pretending it is even remotely secure. It might have been good enough way back, probably the only option, not so much in the current age of spam and digital communication.
There is a difference between disliking something, and having an adrenaline-driven fight or flight fear response to something.
OP doesn't just dislike phones that ring in the middle of the night. OP dislikes phones all day every day, and dislikes them to the extent that he has a physical reaction to them.
Also, I'm not saying that OP must get treatment. I've given OP a strategy to continue to avoid using phones if they want to do so: OP can using UK law to force companies to make "reasonable adjustments". OP can say they have a phone phobia, but OP may face resistance if he says that so he could say he has a hearing impairment. Companies should have things in place to make reasonable adjustments for people with hearing impairment.
Yes, I was half joking and only half serious. I would probably qualify for phone phobia myself and I also definitely prefer not to treat it with government programs or similar. Thus my answer.
As some other guy said: the only time people call is if they want something from you. Yes, but then I prefer to not be force to make an decision on the spot, rather think one minute and then answer, or preferable not be disturbed to begin with.
Some other guy quoted Scott Adams; And I agree "all phone calls have a victim, i.e. the person receiving the call".
So yes, I could qualify for phone phobia, but I don't think there is anything wrong with it, It is rather strange how people think phones are so natural and good, and must be used.
No, they are horrible and tools of evil.
And I'd rather not have a formal diagnose with a paper/digital trail of such a "sensitive" issue as hating phones, I prefer not be sucked into the mental health industry as a patient, prefer not doing the CBT training with exposure to phones or whatever, and I would not be forcing my employer to make even resonable adjustments (I'd rather adjust my employment to something else)
If a ringing phone or a knock on the door causes you stress, rather than diagnose I’ll simply say: it doesn’t have to be that way. One can be focused while simultaneously not jumping at the sound of a ringing phone.
admittedly, although i also wouldn't class it as a mental disorder, i don't like using the phone. interestingly, i find i often have to have a cigarette to calm myself down before making or answering an important call...
Some of us have a different problem, which is that our focus can endanger us or ruin our marriages. For us, it is easy to tune out things going on around us like phone calls, houses burning down, or our spouse repeating the same question with escalating irritation...
> Recently, when I was at mum’s alone, the house phone rang. I didn’t answer it. It rang again immediately. I didn’t answer it. It rang again immediately. I stood over it, willing it to stop, palms sweating.
"Last year, I received a series of 3am calls. At the dial tone, which is set to a horrifically unadjustable volume, I was woken from deep sleep to deep panic. "
That would be the ringtone. ( I suppose there are a large number of people who have never heard a dial tone.)
I thought that anecdote was supposed to paint this picture of the overarching fear the author has with telephones. It's like a scene from a horror movie, I thought it was hilarious
I went to the Badlands in August with my boyfriend and his recent ex’s son who lives with his mom and us at our house. Anyway, we couldn’t set up camp late one night because the site was full, so we got a cheap hotel room.
The kid picked up the phone in the room and said: “It’s making a noise.” Boyfriend said: “Maybe you called the front desk by mistake.” Kid said: “No, it’s some kind of buzzing noise.” Boyfriend laughed and said: “Oh, that’s the dial tone!” I immediately felt old. This ten-year-old didn’t know what a dial tone was.
It’s easy to forget that kids are growing up with different technology than we did. :)
I'd love it if my cell phone auto-screened calls from numbers not in my address book. Give them a special message that explains the only way they'll get through is to leave a message.
Or that they can register their number in a public registry that fully explains who they are and then I can decide whether to take calls from that number.
I never answer calls, ever. My voicemail suggests sending me an email. If the caller doesn't, it's like it never happened. The only reason I even have a SIM card is for data/tethering.
You can sort of do it with an iPhone. Put it on Do Not Disturb except for your contacts. But that will block alerts in addition to calls. I do use that setting at night when I'm traveling. Otherwise I end up sometimes getting junk calls in the middle of the night because of timezone differences.
We also could probably use a system of codes to communicate with automated calling systems so they give up quicker or are able to negotiate a fee they can pay to talk with you. Or leave a text message if you're open to that.
> I'd love it if my cell phone auto-screened calls from numbers not in my address book. Give them a special message that explains the only way they'll get through is to leave a message.
This feature existed (still exists?) for land lines as far back as 2000. It was an add-on service offered by MCI when they started to sell local service in NY and a few other markets. I imagine that it was probably available beyond MCI, but this is speculation.
Getting a phone call always feels so rude. It's like it's saying, "Whatever you are doing, stop RIGHT NOW and listen to me. NOW! NOW! I'm giving you TEN SECONDS! LISTEN TO ME."
This! Phone calls are most impolite way to begin communication in my opinion. I'm probably not alone, because a lot of my acquaintances send a chat message first, like "hi, can I call you right now?".
It can also lead to priority inversion. You handle the caller first despite having a higher priority (like a person next to you). Phone calls feel more urgent. Some people exploit this (e.g. salesmen).
(I might have phone anxiety, but weaker than in the article, and this is just me rationalizing it?)
A weaker variant of this are WhatsApp voice messages. You can delay listening to them, but you cannot skim to the relevant parts and must listen to the drivel before. "Hi ... uh ... sorry for this voice message ... uh ... but I'm too busy to type right know so I thought I'd rather talk ..." Am I the only one who finds this impolite and rude? Obviously this person does not value my time because I have to invest the time to listen. A text message would take a fraction of the time to read. Especially, because people would leave out the drivel. The waste of time multiplies if such voice messages go to group chats.
Turn off vibrations, disable voicemail and set your phone to silent. That way you only get calls when you are looking at your phone. Missed calls go to your call register and you can call them back at a convenient time to your.
Just don’t answer, or, better yet, stick your phone on silent or do not disturb when you are busy. you’re projecting that emotion on to the caller, I see an incoming call as an indication that someone would like to speak to me, it a demand for attention. If I can’t take the call I won’t answer and will call them back (or email to arrange a more suitable time) when I can.
Or better yet, provide the important details over email and then if there is some unimaginable reason why an audio medium is still required to convey information (identify a bird call? place a long distance call with a whistle?) then contact over the phone.
Because this assumes the person is always contactable by email. There is a none zero chance that the person is available for a phone call but not in front of email. Instead you see the email 3 hours later, the sender is now busy as are you so you land up in a game of email ping pong trying to arrange a time. Just put your phone on silent or don’t answer it if you’re not available.
Sure they do. Mine (Android) at least, has an option to decline the call and send one of a variety of text messages to the caller including exactly that one (I'm busy right now, call me back in an hour) with one touch. Does iOS not support this sort of thing as well?
> The problem is the medium.
The problem is synchronous communication. The problem is the telephone. I hate telephones.
> I’m told that, in 1993, 2.5 million people in the UK had “telephone phobia”. That’s over 4%, similar to rates of arachnophobia. This is not unusual, and I’d bet rates are higher now. Everyone hates telephones.
> ...Asynchronous textual communication is how everyone communicates remotely now. It’s here to stay. Killing the telephone is a big market.
I don't hate telephones. I do however hate the implied (and quite arrogant) call to action in that post "I hate telephones and like chat, so we all should get rid of them and exclusively communicate via chat"
I think the problem is that there's a perception that a phone call is an interrupt event. Because you have a person on the phone waiting for you to answer, you have to (or should) answer the call.
So, if the matter is important then a phone call is completely appropriate. But if it's just a call to say "hey, how's it going?" then perhaps a text message or email is a better choice with a "let me know when it's a good time to call" added in so you can have a normal voice conversation without either party being interrupted.
I like communicating with companies via live chat. You can do it discreetly without bothering people around you (e.g. in an office) and usually your situation can be expressed better in text, and you have a transcription at the end to keep to.
For example a few weeks ago I was having problems with my phone, so I contacted OnePlus via their chat, and the lady on the other end arranged the RMA process quickly.
Much quicker than having to enunciate my email address, home address etc over the phone, plus I had a transcription that I could refer to afterwards in follow up emails.
Live Chat is also nice because it doesn't distract me the same a phone conversation does. I'll live chat during the times I'm doing some mindless task (like running scripts).
I was getting the same feel from it. He uses the word fear a few times, and after I read that I couldn't help but frame the piece around social anxiety or insecurity about conversational skills. Of course, surface level it's about the annoyance and technical inefficiencies that come along with the device.
I had the same thought. There is no reason a phone should cause you this much anxiety. He was powerless to act. He could have done a number of things, but instead he walked towards the tormentor and took it in full force. This is not the behavior of a healthy person.
Lots of companies have live chat already, often there are certain things they won’t let you do on live chat because of the perception that it is less secure.
Big companies seem even less like likely to have an email address where you can get service.
The companies can keep their phone line. It’s just better for customers and likely cheaper for them to provide other options.
I have a virtual secretary that came with the phone service. It called voice mail. I don't take unknown calls these days unless I expect them. If they are serious talking to me, they will leave a message. I will simply call them back as needed.
Occasions I took unknown calls were all scams, and these days, it just won't worth the hassle of dealing with them.
What frustrate me the most is when I call them back, it's not a direct line, and/or when the person doesn't answer yet their voice mail is not activated so I can't leave a message.
I do the same; If someone wants to talk on the phone they'll need to text or email beforehand and we'll both agree on a time. My voicemails are automatically transcribed.
Why do companies expect a direct line to me, but no direct line back to them? Why is this a one way street? This is easily solved by letting customers arrange an appointment to call or be called.
Me too. No land line, no mobile. I don't have an anxiety response as detailed here so much as a properly calibrated respect for my own uninterrupted time. Job wants me to get a mobile phone but we'll see. Email makes sense: it's a pull interface. If you want a push interface to communicate with me you'll have to ring my door bell
I recently made the mistake of helping carry the load at work by answering the phone there. It's alright, mostly scripted, & my lack of customer friendliness (Surprising the amount of silence yes/no answers invoke) will hopefully transition us away from having a developer handling support calls soon
They're aware. I said I hate phones in my interview. We're a small company that recently had a third of the company leave. We're getting me to focus on streamlining triage for support emails, where my ability to dig into SQL & RTFS can be done without a client on the line
And they wouldn't have a job if nobody did the accounting, and they wouldn't have a job if nobody did the building maintenance, and they wouldn't have a job if nobody designed marketing material...
A lot of jobs are important. That doesn't imply that everyone should want to do every job.
Customer support is just one job among many. And disliking customer support isn't disliking customers.
Wow presumptious much? I didn't call the customers annoying-- though I'll admit sometimes you get that person. Most of the time people are happy to be interacting with someone who at leasts knows what they're doing & can solve their problem. Woe is me for being problem oriented rather than customer oriented
You do realize those annoying customers wouldn't have anything to call about if it without those introverted developers who are busy programming whatever's been management's whim since last sprint?
I'm about to ditch my landline and one of the main reasons (in addition to not using it much) is that legitimate calls are far outnumbered by junk calls. I don't answer numbers I don't recognize but it's still a distraction.
There seems to be some principle in play where the misuse of a communications channel rises to the point where it's annoying but not quite unusable. If I got 20 junk calls a day, I'd have to turn my phone off. As it is, it's at nuisance level but still usable.
Out of curiousity, when were you born? I was born in the 80's, and among my friends literally noone has a landline, not even the older ones. There's simply no argument for it. I'm in northern Europe by the way.
There IS an argument for it. Around a year ago we had a freak windstorm here. It was an amazing experience - took down trees and tore apart roofs all over. I'd never seen houses crushed by trees before. The power was out for days in some places, including mine. My phone battery died after a day, ditto the laptop's battery. My landline continued to function throughout.
As I recall the service was also extremely inexpensive as part of a DSL bundle. It is true that the landline was a powerful spam magnet, much more so than my cell.
Natural disasters that cut off power for more than a few hours are unlikely in Northern Europe. Cell towers have their own emergency power supply to deal with the once in a decade brown out.
If the power is off for days it means the Apocalypse or WW3 has happened.
Northern Europe refers geographically to the northern part of Europe, or in a narrower sense, to the cultural grouping of the Nordic countries, Baltic countries, and sometimes also the British Isles. (Wikipedia)
Thank you, however I wasn't looking for the Wikipedia definition. I could have easily looked that up myself. I wanted to know what the poster personally meant by the term.
It’s not that uncommon here in Canada. It’s not like it happens every winter, but it is not uncommon to have some huge snow storm or frost that leaves some people without power for days.
Just this last winter thousands in New Brunswick were left with no power in the dead of winter for over a week.
>The power was out for days in some places, including mine. My phone battery died after a day, ditto the laptop's battery. My landline continued to function throughout.
In your case PSTN was the "stable fallback" but there is nothing inherent in the technology that makes this so. Your phone stations still need power, and if they don't have backup power they'll be dead as well.
Cables have a bigger chance of breaking if they're in the air, less so if they're buried. Of course, PSTN, power and fiber can all be both in the air or buried. There's nothing inherent in any of them that make them more "resilient". So if you live in an area where your PSTN is buried and your power lines aren't, it might to lead you to conclude that PSTN is "stable", in fact there's nothing about PSTN in itself that makes it so.
In a lot of places, cell towers will have backup power as well, and so will fiber networks, and your power network might be (should be, probably) buried and better protected than your other cables.
You also have E911 with a landline that you don't get with the same accuracy/resolution with cellular service.
AFAIK, it's not super-cheap with Comcast especially as it uses a different modem than my Internet service.
One of the reasons that landlines are more of a spam magnet is that a lot of call types are exempted from the do not call list on landlines but not cell phones. There may be other reasons as well.
Not OP, but same here. Born in the 80s and only our parents have landlines. Though my mobile and office phone receive far more spam calls than real calls. My Google voice line gets a hand full of robot voicemails per day. The "Should I answer?" app blocks a lot, but not all.
Born in the 60s, old enough to be your parent: no landline at our house in I don’t know how many years. We both have a phone that’s nearby all of the time, what would we do with a landline except as a spam vector?
And my parents, who are old enough to be your grandparents? Ditched the landline a couple of years ago. I have no idea what the demographics look like for hardlines anymore.
I despise phone calls. They are blocking, synchronous, distracting, painful (having to hold a phone up in the cases I'm not at a desktop with a softphone and headset), I hate repeating myself whenever I need to read a password or username or email or anything (I have a non-.com email too, so many call centre people have literally zero idea what to make of this). Any time I have to make a call it's a multi-hour ordeal, repeating myself numerous times, on hold for half an hour or more. With phone: I don't know who you are, I don't know your number, I'm not going to verify anything until I can positively identify the caller first.
I've not had a landline before. My first ever phone in primary school was an Android. Where I am, it's not even possible to get an ancient legacy physical landline service - all available providers are transparently be VoIP (like Comcast).
My only experience with phone calls has been automated spammers and PagerDuty during an oncall outage. For personal, if it's important, email me, I reply in under 60 seconds from anywhere. I get push notifications. Not a single one (I cannot even think of _one_) of my friends like phone calls: I don't remember their numbers, they don't remember my numbers, we just message each other on Discord or Messenger or Hipchat or [...]. Most of them get actually quite pissed off if there's a standard voice call that isn't a life threatening emergency. Worst-case is iMessage/SMS.
For work purposes, if something is down, message me on Slack or something. I see your username and team, I can find what's wrong while replying. If you call me, it's a waste of time during a high priority outage if that.
True, not that it matters, but my parents and my in laws have a decade or two on you... One lives in an area with poor cell service (surrounded by good service). My Dad doesn't carry, and when he does it's a feature phone that is off. Ha.
Of the residents I know for sure do or don't have a land line, they are the only ones.
Yeah, there is the assumption of “for those with coverage”. We couldn’t cut the line until we switched to T-Mobile, because AT&T could not get coverage to our house smack in the middle of Redmond, WA.
- Until we switched wholesale to a videoconferencing provider, I pretty much needed a landline for work purposes. In addition to just routine conference calls, our webcast provider wanted us on landlines when we gave webinars and I had little desire to go into the office at 11pm at night for the Asia Pacific webcast slot.
- I get poor cellphone reception at my house. Not really an issue now with WiFi assist but I pretty much needed a landline (actually Comcast triple-play) before that.
- I preferred having phones throughout the house and having an emergency backup.
- I like/liked the ability to give out a legitimate phone number that is not my cell.
Rarely can I get the same level of service out of companies over text that I can easily over the phone. Talking to a human over the phone is by far the most customer friendly medium of communication. I can do it without physically going anywhere, yet I get almost all the benefits of visiting the business.
Online chats on websites are usually undermanned and overall useless. On the phone I am sure I have at least one person's attention. The rep isn't trying to talk to five people at the same time, we can both focus on the issue, the back and forth is almost instantaneous, and we can come to some conclusion at the end.
Hahaha, like "using the phone" means "talking to a human", that's a good one.
Using the phone means
1. Listening to a long list of automated selections, none of which are ever useful (pretty much information more easily available over the Internet).
2. Getting placed on hold for tens of minutes or an hour or more.
3. Talking to someone who will ignore your question and ask if you have tried some obvious or irrelevant option.
4. Forwarded to someone else who might be able to help you with your problem.
5. Maybe getting cut off, needing to start the entire process over again from the beginning.
In short, without massive increases in staffing and training, using the phone for customer support is almost always worse than an equivalent text, web, or email based solution.
The article went into even more detail about these shortcomings than I did, by the way.
I have no trouble getting to a human in a reasonable time (under 10 minutes) as a regular customer for services like cable/Internet, mobile, building maintenance. And for business services I usually have a real person's card and a direct phone number to them.
At least in Germany, shouting "I WANT TO SPEAK TO A HUMAN" in an angry tone to the automated menu works all the time. I never wait for a real person more than one minute.
I would find "under 10 minutes" to be a quite annoying amount of time, especially if I'm paying for them the premium rate that some customer services have.
I easily waste 10 minutes per online support chat waiting for the agent to deal with the 4 other cases they are on, fixing my typos because typing is worse than speaking and dealing with the context switching that comes from doing other stuff whilst waiting for them to respond.
Much better to start the call, get through the menu and then put my phone on the desk either on speaker or with a hands free set and doing something else whilst waiting for them, once I get the person on the phone I can then focus on the call and not other things.
It's less about having one person's attention, and more about making the BATNA for solving your problem "customer ties up a CS agent for phone support at $10/hr until the problem gets solved".
While I don't have a phone phobia, I do hate how much time it takes to get a simple piece of information.
A recent example: I wanted to book a suite at a hotel. The hotel is not tall, and it overlooks a very noisy bar on one side. Is it possible to get a suite on the other side? Where will I be located, anyway?
This information is not online. Instead I have to engage in a phone call. Spend some time on hold. Bounce between people who work in the hotel and a reservations desk a couple of time. Eventually I get the answer, and it's exactly what I want.
But. I'm bothered in two directions. One, that the information is not at my fingertips.
The other, that I find it irritating to have that actual conversation to get the information I want. I'd like to have a better handle on this mental impatience.
I get this totally. I don't like calling, not because of any anxiety, but because I don't know what awaits me. When I call a company I feel like although I am initiating the contact, they will take control of the call.
And as for receiving I remember someone mentioning that a ringing phone is essentially someone saying "Speak to me now, speak to me now, speak to me now". It is an inherently rude form of communication because it demands instant attention with no regard to what you may be doing.
I just don't answer calls these days unless they are from family. I was getting a lot of sales calls from my electricity provider who also wanted to sell me gas. We don't have gas at our home, but they wouldn't log that fact. So I blocked their number.
Last week I got an email from them saying that they had been trying to call me for some time to let me know about an amazing offer, and that they think I may have accidentally blocked their number.
Of course, they couldn't just put the details of the offer in the email. I had to call them.
This article is hilarious and well written. Despite it being about suffering a little too much pain over phone calls, I think it's also meant to be funny. Take for example his story about being too nervous to call his own doctor and eventually getting just better on his own, and therefore how he wonders if telephones are a tool used by the national health service to cut costs.
I wonder how he would have survived in the days of only telephones and no text messages, or in the days of no telephones and only unexpected raps at the door.
His indictment of telephone customer service is thorough. Even people who don't normally dread phone calls probably dread trying to call a company.
I can’t speak for the author, but people going incredible length to avoid phone calls is a real thing.
What surprises me is the author not having the online credentials handy. I also hate phone calls with a passion, and the first thing I look for in a bank is the online interface and how good their app is maintained.
I had to give up on well regarded local banks because of how they focus on “human touch” and had sub-par online tools.
Same with doctors, it took a lot of time to find a range of doctors that had online reservation systems but that’s definitely doable in europe at least.
I survived the years where phoning people was the only way, but even then I tried to have alternatives (actually going to the company’s office was usually a lot better for instance).
Basically I think telephone was a mistake, and wish it a painful and quick death so we forget about it yesterday.
> he wonders if telephones are a tool used by the national health service to cut costs
that just lowered my opinion of him. first he mentions there is an online service, but for some reason he can't be bothered to obtain the user id required to use it. similarly with his bank, he can't use facebook messenger to communicate with them (and why on earth would he want to) and mentions their other digital banking services for online access, but again refuses to use them. the report of millions of people with 'telephone phobia' is misrepresenting things - there are not 4.5 million people with a mental condition that causes them fear and anxiety when confronted by a telephone, there are that many people who don't like phones, the same as there are that many people who don't like spiders. and the idea that the NHS might be trying to save money by providing a telephone service staffed 24/7 is just so ludicrous it's hard to know how to respond. the author obviously has mental health issues regarding social interactions, and should seek help for that issue rather than trying to replace the telephone.
Not alone here, I have my work phone unplugged or permanently on do not disturb (straight to voicemail which gets converted into text in an email), likewise on my cell phone I reject almost all calls and an automatic reply via text saying “I’m sorry, I’m not able to take your call or you’re calling for an unknown number, please email or iMessage me instead”, if the number calling is a land line my carrier converts this to a robo-voice and calls them back to say this, if the number is blocked - tough luck.
Not only are 99% of phone calls a waste of time, you’re inefficient with no written log of the conversation (not even for security but also to improve workflow and prioritisation / memory recall), furthermore the impact of the context shifting from what I’m currently working on / deep in thought over to a jarring phone conversation at the time that suits the caller - is incredibly disruptive.
People should send calling cards ("Hi, it's so-and-so, wish to call on you at your convenience") and wait for a response. Same for telephones (send an email/text message first).
Same here. Anyone at my door who I don't expect is either proselytizing for their religion (looking at you Mormons and JWs), begging for money, or trying to sell me something.
Phone calls in isolation are terrible. I've worked as support for both older and newer service providers. For the older provider, calls reached support agents with all the customer's information readily available, and support agents had easy means to invite customers to screen sharing sessions, so they could see what we were looking at and we could discuss it together.
That said, some customers weren't able to share screens (typically because they were working with classified systems), so I acquired the fairly uncommon skill of directing people through a Unix system by speaking commands letter by letter in the NATO phonetic alphabet while navigating through my own example system. That was slow, but it worked, and was necessary given the restrictions.
With my newer service provider, phone support is seen as some sort of extra option in case of emergencies, and is treated more or less as a pager system. Calls come in with no context, we do not have screen sharing, and the experience is generally terrible for both the customer and support agent.
No means of support is inherently bad, but all means of contacting support have their limitations. Good support departments recognize those limitations and address them, so that all avenues of support are effective for either addressing an issue or communicating why it must be handled via another channel if it's not something that can be resolved at the point of contact.
I also manage a support team. Phone calls are indeed not very useful for solving issues, but they are critical for reducing customer anxiety and ensuring that you've understood their problem correctly.
Caller: Sir, I can not give you any information until you identify yourself.
Me: Hahah. /click
Don't call me and make demands. Seriously. If you aren't willing to tell me why you just called this number, I'm not even going to verify I'm a person let alone identify myself.
What's interesting here is how things are different from say 20-30 years ago, when everyone would answer their land-line with 'Hello, this is NAME on NUMBER, can I help you' or some variant. This is how I was taught to answer the phone at home, certainly.
Perhaps what's changed is that calls are no longer expensive, and numbers are no longer hand-dialled, so knowing as quickly as possible that you had connected to the wrong number or person is not as important. There's probably other cultural issues at work, I guess, to do with an increased awareness of privacy and so on. The way we communicate has certainly been changed by the Internet and mobile phones in an enormous way.
I ran a business for several years that never quite grew large enough to support additional technical staff, so I was always on call. It didn't happen often, but I got enough calls (or pages, since that was how I dealt with it in early couple of years) in the middle of the night to where I literally had nightmares about a phone ringing for a while. Even today sometimes my stomach hurts and I feel angry when the phone rings.
I've never liked the phone, but I really hate it these days when there are so many better ways to communicate.
I have an after-hours pager about once a year or so, and each time I get the same sense of low-grade trepidation at night. Sleep quality also suffers tremendously, I'm always wide awake at the lightest disturbance. It's terrible, and I always feel for anyone who has to be on call at night with regularity.
In terms of startup ideas, there is probably an Uber like service opportunity here. An app where your "operators" can download and put on their phone, and when ever they want to they can put them selves "active" at which point you will route calls to them over your VOIP network, they take calls, record the data (name and number). You pay them per hour to be on-call, your customers pay you per call, and for infrastructure you need an enterprise account with a VOIP provider, a web site, and a way to accept payments. (That might be what Answer America is doing, I don't know but it seems pretty doable)
It sounds like a good idea in theory, and excuse my being unimiginitive, but answering services are even more blue collar than ride hailing. It's a lot of work that I'm not sure many people want (the operators and everyone else involved with running the service).
Anyway, the big problem with this concept is the profitability of answering services is predicated on constantly changing the rates and dropping "dead weight clients" (that is an industry term from the guy who facilitates answering service sales). I don't know if this is possible in an uberized answering service.
Would answered calls be worth enough that people would pay a higher rate during higher demand periods? I honestly don't think so.
The industry could stand some innovation - it is severely lacking. Why is it that 70% of all answering service sites are not served with TLS?
(hint: proprietary answering service equipment vendors have choked the industry and now it can't innovate)
I don't think you're being unimaginative, you're asking good questions.
There are a two things which are orthogonal here, one is capturing what might be called 'fractional GDP' from available workers. Basically that is ways in which people are creating an easy way for an individual worker to work or not work based by creating a disintermediated interface between the service users and the service providers. The 'App' economy, the 'Gig' economy, what ever you call it, it tries to create a lightly held employment relationship between service provider and client in the form of an application and a payment provider.
The second thing is whether or not there is enough value in a telephone answering service that it can be successfully monetized. That is an operational efficiency question which would depend on some research into the hows and whats of implementing such a service. Customers for such a service go from the rich and famous who might go so far as to hire a staff member to screen their calls, to someone who has never considered it. Using existing infrastructure and full time staff clearly hits a minimum cost point, and then folks like the author of the essay don't get enough value to hire the service at the rates they need to charge.
Bottom line is if the service can be restructured in such a way to be additionally more efficient such that you can capture the low end of the market and perhaps serve the upper end at a better rate. If you can that is a business.
If I don't recognize a number, or have a scheduled call, I will almost always let the call go to voicemail. Then I'll decide if the call warrants a call back. Usually it doesn't.
I don't like to answer unexpected calls from anyone. It was different when the phone was the only instant communication medium... one hd more time to prepare for the content of a given call.
Now, it is always a distraction... my girlfriend frequently calls without warning in the middle of a text conversation, and i often don't answer because i'm not ready. It takes a far greater level of attention and commitment to talk on the phone than to participate in a text based conversation.
I think you have it right. No obligation to answer a call. Not answering just means that it's not a good time. Sadly a lot of people seem to think it is rude.
It's odd that despite the author's hatred of phone calls, he doesn't do pretty basic things to avoid them. I've learned after a while that the first thing you should do when you set up any new account like a credit card, gym, health insurance, electric company, ISP, etc. is set up and link the online account to the real account. Yes it's super annoying that these are usually not the same thing, but once you know the routine it's not too complicated and you're way better off setting it up front.
In addition to potentially avoiding phone calls in the future, this also makes it more likely you'll actually be informed if you owe them money or otherwise need to respond. Otherwise, they don't have to make any effort to contact you over any medium other than paper mail (and if you're lucky phone), and if you happen to not read it or not answer the call, or maybe you've moved addresses and the forwarding period has ended, they can just send your account to collections. Only then, once your credit is sufficiently ruined, will the collections agency actually put some effort into getting a hold of you.
It's such a crazy system, there really needs to be some kind of national digital notification service to replace USPS for sending people legally binding notifications and bills.
I wonder if this might be a general trend as the bulk of communication has pretty much already moved to text. If not outright phobia, at least dislike of the medium of 'speaking' would seem to be likely.
More companies might need to accelerate towards offering text/chat options for their customer service if they don't already. It may not directly put a customer off, but it might be another signal in a list of comparisons that pushes the scales in favour of a competitor.
Besides his emotional issues there author touches on a few great points.
1. Why do we use a loose, unstructured medium like voice for customer support and the script and restrict almost everything about it? Maybe basic support would be better in a different medium and only escalations go to phone?
2. Social engineering is still one of the most effective ways of hacking and the phone is a great medium for that. Yet we apparently year the phone like a more secure channel.
Because it is the most simplest and the most spread one? You don't need to sign up for yet-another-communication-service; you are not dependent on corporations like Facebook to conduct your business; you don't need to install an app.
Unreliable, easy to break, no way to contact a user back if they navigate away. Plus most small/medium business websites are simple, static pages currently, with no interactivity, let alone TLS to protect their users conversations.
In the past I had a neutral attitude towards telephones. Until one day I realized I receive quite too many and started checking - how many of them are really useful to me. How often someone calls to give me something, and how often they want something from me. It turned out almost in 100% cases the calls were from people who wanted something from me. And of course they wanted a synchronous reply I couldn't or sometimes didn't want to give. So I decided to block all calls instead of one number (from my second half - in this case it doesn't matter if she wants to give or take, I'm still fine with all her calls).
And you know what? Most friends quickly learned to respect it. They know they can always communicate to me via e-mail and I'll happily call them back or meet or whatever is needed. I use my phone mainly as a minicomputer with an additional function of communicating with the person I choose. And for these rare cases when I actually need to wait for an important phone call (this happens once a year maybe) I use an old throwaway phone with a prepaid SIM card. I only switch it on for as long as it's needed.
I have seen this with young people in general (I don’t know the author’s age). They have anxiety about having a real time conversation on the phone. They don’t seem to have problems talking face-to-face, so it must be related to not being able to see the face of the interlocutor. It is a problem when doing business. Sometimes a phone call is the best way to resolve an issue.
I've been saying essentially the same thing for years. I'm glad people are catching on that the legacy phone system is a joke. Phone companies are also complicit in the international scams performed over their system. Good luck getting them to block repeat spam; they will usually suggest you install some 3rd party app on your phone before they even consider taking action. Even then, they usually won't take action.
At one point I was getting dozens of spam calls every day. I thought I'd just whitelist the numbers I'd want to let contact me, but for some reason Android does not come with this feature. The problem with 3rd party apps is that you still receive a call, but it hangs up immediately, so you will still have a notification and sometimes a vibration if the app doesn't respond immediately. So I said to hell with it and I turned off all incoming calls. If people need to talk to me, they can leave a voicemail or text me beforehand.
I do exactly the same. If I haven't agreed to a time in advance (and I usually haven't), then my phone notifications will be off. I can be reached any time of the day via text or email, but an unsolicited call is out of the question.
When companies insist on only contacting me directly via the phone and expecting an immediate answer; yet forcing me into a labyrinth to talk to a stranger when I need to contact them: Why would I ever agree to this horrible one-way street?
Sure. Because so many people are using cell phones these days. As a result, you have a lot of poor reception/dropped calls/etc. that would have been unheard of in the days of the Bell system much less newer fiber optic networks. In many things (see also music listening to a large degree) we've regressed considerably in quality to buy convenience.
Yes, it's all shitty low bandwidth mobile phone voice codecs or VOIP stuff. Good old digital trunk lines (8 bit 8 ksample/sec mu-law -- the same as the .au file encoding, I think) sounded really quite good.
ulaw isn't all that good, but EVRC running at full rate, nevermind how Sprint and Verizon ran it at much less than that just butchers voice calls.
Opus will hopefully end the mish-mash of codecs that currently permeate telephony, as it is much higher quality at lower bitrates, and unlike GSM, ulaw, and even G722 (which some call HD Voice) it can handle packet loss gracefully. Makes all commonly used codecs look terrible in comparison.
Anyone exhibiting Mr Fishers phobia needs to consider seeing a therapist - Its going to cause them major problems at work and socially.
I have noticed a reluctance to use the goddammed phone as intended - rather than call me to discus something important and time sensitive people will just add a task to base camp in a some what passive aggressive way
I have no social anxiety or fear of public speaking or anything of the sort (I studied theatre for years and now I do improv in my free time). I have no problems at work; I like to think I have no problems socially.
Yet I also hate telephones for all of the reasons that the author listed. Part of a past job involved helping customers over the phone. Calls are interruptive, unreliable, and inefficient. Repeating names, addresses, numbers, or relying on customers to accurately describe something. There is no real authentication.
Maybe it's a good medium for people who have trouble writing/typing effectively.
My friends do not use the telephone either. We agree where/when via text or email.
You see typically extroverted people having no problems with being on the phone all the time, probably because they call equally extroverted people who do the same. Look at sales people, or people who have to work with other people a lot, they approach the phone as a tool for getting what they want and quickly.
My solution, as an introvert, is to never answer calls from people who are not my family. I have a twillio service setup that manages my voicemail and sends me an SMS message of the transcription, that way I can review the content and purpose of the call and decide what to do next (although I don't think Twilio's voice transcription service can accurately decipher British accents that well so you do end up with some hilarious results)
99% of time it's either recruiters who've managed to scalp my number from somewhere, or the odd spam caller.
I literally will patronize business that cost a little more just because they let me schedule online.
For me, I'll give an example - chimney sweep. The company I use lets me request a service appointment online and lists it's prices online. The rest I saw I had to call for both prices and appointments. No, thanks.
Calling for prices... outside of very special circumstances, no thank you!
"If you have to ask for the price, then you can't afford it."
Well, I probably can afford it, but if I have to ask for the price then the business is asking more from me than I am of them. I'll go with whatever competitor doesn't seem to be actively hiding something from me, thanks.
> I unplugged my landline phone. I have only plugged it back in once, and briefly, when debugging my internet connection, to check whether the line had a dial tone.
That's generally the only thing landline phones are good for anymore. When I lived in the UK I was with the nerdiest ISP there (AAISP) and they offer a "broadband only" landline, that carries your DSL and a basic diagnostic service including a dialtone (mostly to prevent wayward OpenReach engineers from misdiagnosing your copper pair as "unused"), but no real phone calls. Suited me fine.
I suspect a good fraction of my excess income is a product of enjoying in-person meetings and phone calls and working in tech. For certain classes of coördination and problems, voice is more efficient.
I know it's all YMMV, but the number of spam phone calls that I receive has dropped to zero (not exaggerating here). There used to be one annoying travel/timeshare caller, but I reported them to the FTC two or three times, and that took care of it. I personally believe that it's fairly easy because of the time and date information that your phone's dialer/phone app records, but it could be easier with a bespoke FTC "donotcall" app. I'd rather involve the FTC in this sort of thing because it is part of their mandate, and benefits that they bring get propagated to all phone users (Android/iPhone/Windows Phone/feature phones/landlines).
I think this will be interesting because there is probably a lot of overlap between people critical of phones and people critical of voicemail ... but it's actually sort of difficult to have a phone without voicemail.
If you disable voicemail with your carrier, it doesn't work the way you think (hope) it will. When you fail to answer, the carrier gives some weird message about the subscriber being unavailable which just makes people think you don't pay your phonebill or something. In short, you cannot, from the standpoint of your carrier, just have no response other than ringing.
I have a Google Voice number, and phone set to ring only for people on a whitelist. So I pick the phone only from family and friends and calls that I expected. Everybody else gets to leave a voice message. I get a transcription on email and call back if it's worth it. If they don't leave a voice message, that means it wasn't important.
Other than the NHS conspiracy theory and the desire to hand even more power over to facebook, I completely understand where the author's coming from. Especially not knowing who'll be on the other end (caller ID only identifies the number, not the person); and trying to anticipate and gather all necessary details to hand before embarking, due to being tethered to the wall/desk.
I've spent a while thinking about this over the years. I think a much better form of interaction is the landline answering machine: the caller will be heard for a few seconds ("Hi it's Bob, are you there?"), the recipient can decide whether to answer, and if not then the caller doesn't know if they were available or not. Contrast that with current BS like "it disconnected after one ring, so I know you hit cancel".
A similar mode of interaction is that of the walkie talkie, although that doesn't give the option of leaving a message.
Seems like unjust complaining about the phenomena, when the technology is actually to blame. I do dislike phones myself, but have accepted the status quo of obligatory having one and answering the calls. But it seems unacceptably stupid how hard it is in Android to configure what seems to me like the most basic features of the dialer. One would think that built-in answering machine, completely transparent phone number blacklist/whitelist configuration (including time of the day, CID, "mode" and appropriate action — reject w/ or w/o notifying me, silently ignore, answer automatically, answer manually, etc.) is a must have. But call handling (on par with a contact list and other "mandatory" apps) is about the lamest software on my smart"phone". Why the hell this device has a browser built-in, but cannot handle incoming/outgoing calls properly?!
Yes: +1 to this. I'm probably one of those 4%. But this "phobia" might just initially be a slight negative feeling of not knowing who or what it is. But it is enough to tip the balance since the majority of calls you get are spam or otherwise unsolicited crap, and the few real calls actually meant for you arn't positive either - then it becomes a learned fear that reinforces itself every time.
I would never call if there is another way using text or other medium, I will not answer if it is not known or there is a good probability I know what it is. If I really have to make a call, that entails preparations and lots of wasted energy (it is wasted since would write it down, and then I could just send it as text and it would be easy to read and understand...)
Sure I can and do use Truecaller, and other ways to block spam or unwanted calls, and It really does work. I still hate the phone though.
I hate the phone because the lack of visual cues and the delay makes a conversation really hard, I find myself starting to talk too early/too late and I find it exhausting.
I really hate the phone when someone rings me and spends 10 minutes getting to the point of the call which is something that could have been done in a text/email, wasn't urgent and largely is a yes/no thing.
Also if you send and email and then ring 20 minutes later to see if I got the email a) I hate you b) I'll DND your extension (I read the manual for our phones at work - I think I am probably the only one who has).
The only person who can actually make my work phone make a ringing noise is the boss, everyone else who isn't on the DND list just makes the display flash blue.
> If I were rich, I would have a permanent secretary. All calls first reach the secretary. The secretary would arrange the conversation for a date and time that suits my calendar.
I'd be surprised if there isn't a twillio-based system for this already...
Phone calls are like the most obnoxious possible pop-up web ad, taking over your entire display and demanding immediate attention, while being the thing you least care about at that instant. They manage to be worse than ads, too: at least with an ad you’re doing something explicit when the ad appears (like clicking a link); a phone call can literally interrupt you in the middle of typing, and HIDE everything you’re doing! Bonus points if you were about to tap on something and end up tapping one of the buttons on your pop-up phone call instead.
I can’t believe we’re at version 11 of iOS when people needed a backgrounded/tiny phone UI since about iOS 2.
Imagine if every person in the world had the ability, at their arbitrary whim, to anonymously activate your fire alarm inside your home. That is the reality of the instant message. There is nothing quite as rude as the new message chime.
Face-time can be magical. Especially around the holidays. When clusters of your tribe gather in geographically disperse points. But you can still experience a simulacrum of "presence".
But author has a point about banks being particularly egregious offenders of phone dependency. They are progressing. With voice print and zelle. As well as iris scans. But I still need face to face in person meetings about once per month. And though face authenticated live full duplex video can serve as a proxy. Trust that is built from a personal connection may never be disrupted.
I've essentially written Facetime off at this point, between firewall issues, hit and miss support among my contacts, and multiple frustrating attempts to use it with my mother, it just isn't worth it. Easier to throw her on Signal and use that, plus she can join the family group chat then.
Making phone calls "unnannounced" has always been a struggle of mine, mainly because I start to think "am I bothering them?" and then negative thoughts start to flood in. I do have anxiety issues which I go to therapy for, but I'd put making phonecalls lower down the priority list of things to tackle because it's not that important to me in the grand scheme of things.
Completely irrational, I know, but that's where I'm at. Usually if I want to make a phonecall I arrange it with the person for a set time that suits both parties.
On my iPhone I use the AT&T Call Protect app and it works pretty well. Though I am still getting a few spam calls from phone numbers with my same exchange which go unanswered.
I would think sooner or later the telemarketers are training the public/the masses that answering unknown calls isn’t worth it making it an unprofitable business. Just read all the comments here and on Facebook re: this... ppl just don’t answer the phone like they use to.
For me If we haven’t spoken before text, email, FB or leave me a voice message and I’ll call you or actually answer your call.
For about $300/mo you can have a personal assistant who will do what he wants to have done with phone calls. But, for free, you can have Google Voice, which you should get anyway if you travel internationally or use Hangouts, which will block spam calls and screen calls from numbers not in your known contacts. If he works with a group of people in a consultancy, there are numerous small business pbx-aaS services that have auto-attendant features for call screening or that can be used in combination with a human personal assistant.
Text messages have their own issues. I kinda like 'em for, 'what do you want at the store' type queries but there is this whole 'text game' flirting thing I think I'm supposed to learn how to do and can't really figure out. It feels like a 90s action movie with two people shooting back and forth at each other for 20 minutes to little effect. Highly edited perpetual conversations filled with weird iconography that, at this point, I pretty much choose at random. This is what being old feels like.
I must be a very different person compare to the author. I prefer phone calls a lot more than text/emails. Because I can usually get a result in a much shorter timespan.
Everyone complains about companies’ customer service being terrible. But the companies are not the real problem here. The problem is the medium. The problem is synchronous communication. The problem is the telephone. I hate telephones.
What? No.
Once upon a time, a business department could take a message and return it later. You know, exactly like what you would do with email. Asynchronously.
Studied in Boston and loved coming back to Norway, no more phone spam!
Log on to a central governmental service, with your 2-auth, opt out your phone-number and mail-address (the paper one) and then you don’t get more spam after 2-3weeks. It takes some time for everyone to update.
Why are are there not something similar in the US?
Phone for me is an intrusion when it's not very close people. I tend to hate phone as well but if the conventions around phoning changed like, you'd systematically agree through messaging on a certain moment to call etc I guess I could reconcile with the dreaded instrument.
I'm not sure why this has been downvoted. James wrote this:
> Recently, when I was at mum’s alone, the house phone rang. I didn’t answer it. It rang again immediately. I didn’t answer it. It rang again immediately. I stood over it, willing it to stop, palms sweating.
That meets the UK legal definition of a disability, and under UK law he can ask for reasonable adjustments to avoid telephones. He could give his mental health status as the reason he needs the reasonable adjustment, but most places won't know much about that, and so it would be easier if he used hearing impairment - many places know about hearing impairment, and have processes in place to avoid telephone use.
Maybe I should have said I'm speaking from personal experience: I've got a bank and some bits of government departments and some bits of the NHS to use email rather than telephone with me.
Uh why allow anyone other than people on your contact list to even get anything other than a busy signal ... I do this on my home phone and mobile. If my phone rings it’s someone I know.
1. Gethuman will handle a lot of these truly unpleasant phone calls. They are awesome. I had them call Telus, the cost was $30. Worth every cent. Took me several months to realize I am just unable to do this one. I ... just couldn't.
2. I never answer my calls. They go to voicemail. All of them. I do not even have incoming phone service in the first place; I have a data only plan and an Anveo subscription. I will call you back via VoIP if I choose to do so, at my convenience, at my desk, indeed armed with all the data I need to make a successful call.
I hate not just telephones, but being funneled into this whole culture of being disturbed, and disturbing people anywhere, anytime, at will, for things that can wait.
As both an introvert and a technical person I do almost everything I do with deep concentration, whether that be coding, playing piano, reading papers, biking, driving, or hiking. A single phone ring, a single "hey what's up", while I'm in the middle of coding causes a cataclysmic implosion of an immensely complicated thought structure that takes a several minutes to rebuild. A single phone ring while I'm biking or driving is honestly dangerous. A single phone ring while I'm playing the piano and not only will I lose track of what I'm trying to learn, but I will also not be in a state of mind to speak a human language, and will probably answer the phone call with gibberish. Hence, my phone is in airplane mode a lot of the time. The rest of the time I have a call blocker on that only accepts calls from a few known numbers. The only time I turn off the call blocker is if someone has pre-arranged a phone call with me and it's on my calendar.
I also highly value social time and try to give 100% undivided attention during them. I loathe people who look at their phones while I'm trying to talk to them, and people who ask me to go to dinner with them and then go on a phone call for 50% of the dinner. It makes me feel unimportant, makes me feel like I wasted my time trekking out to meet them. I don't want to do the same thing to other people.
I realize that not everyone is like that. But I get the worst end of the stick when people think they can just call me "sometime in the afternoon". Realistically that means I will get NOTHING done that entire afternoon except wait for your damn phone call because I need to deal with your inability to schedule a time and respect my time. I honestly miss the days when cell phones had not yet been invented. I miss the days when people would just set a time and place, meet, talk, leave, and get on with business according to a plan.
I do, however, love the ability to access the internet from anywhere for maps, bus/train times, news, and other information, when I want it.
Oh, another reason I hate calls and typically shut my phone off is because it's increasingly difficult to do so in privacy. I spend a lot of time outdoors, on public transit, and so on, and the last thing I need is a bunch of bystanders staring and eavesdropping on my calls, and even commenting on what I'm speaking. I also don't like it when contexts mix, e.g. friends from different circles hear conversations of mine from another circle. It results in me going into a shock state where I basically cannot talk. It happens so often that I just stopped using voice calls altogether, for the most part.
>they can just call me "sometime in the afternoon".
Oh dear GOD this is possibly one of the worst phrases to ever be uttered by a human being. I have no doubt that this single phrase has stolen countless entire days or weeks of many people's life.
Waiting for your call means not doing something that I can concentrate on. I'll even avoid conversations with others while waiting for your call because I don't want to have to take your call and break a meaningful conversation or make the other person feel like your call is worth more of my time than theirs. I have to stay chained to my phone, often chained to a secluded area where I know your call and our conversation won't disturb others around me. Waiting for your call means all other appointments and events between now and your call are hereby cancelled. I'm afraid to use the restroom while waiting for your call because I fear I'll miss your call while washing my hands. I'm afraid to eat or drink- what if I get the hiccups? What if my soda pop is especially carbonated and I end up burping all during our discussion? Why am I subjected to wait on you at all? No, my entire life stops because of your choice to use this inefficient, synchronous communication medium. My life is too short to wait for your call.
> I spend a lot of time outdoors, on public transit, and so on, and the last thing I need is a bunch of bystanders staring and eavesdropping on my calls, and even commenting on what I'm speaking
I guess just some people don't have any issues with this, when I'm out and about I do see a lot of people on the phone all the time - usually through a bluetooh headset or other ear piece.
Wouldn't dream of it myself, but different strokes for different folks I guess!
Too bad I can't charge everyone a dollar (or five) who calls me unless they are on my white list. I think this would fix spam calls completely and still let unwhite listed people contact me.
It seems that I've offended a few people. Sorry. I ought to know better than making comments that are contentious, brief and joking.
My point is that I'm getting old. And so I've become more sympathetic to issues around spam calls to older people. Who may be hard of hearing, slow to understand, and gullible. I suffer from none of that so far. But I can fake it, following the Eddie script.
Basically, I give callers a chance to get that I'm old, and a little incoherent. If they back off, and apologize for bothering me, I thank them, and wish them the best of luck.
But if they push, knowing that I'm old and apparently vulnerable, I segue into full Eddie. With no regrets.
'''Text and email are polite invitations to a conversation. They happen at the speed and leisure of both the sender and the receiver. In stark contrast, when you get a phone call, it’s almost always a convenient time for the caller and a bad time for the recipient, who I refer to as the “victim” because I insist on accuracy. My philosophy is that every phone conversation has a loser.'''
I love telephones, they're useful for having efficient and comfortable synchronous conversations. I don't think the level of hatred expressed here is warranted. Yeah, it's annoying when occasionally you receive a phone call at an unwanted hour, but sometimes it's crucial for people to get in contact with you.
I have a publicly listed number (in addition to a private one), and I have not received a spam call this year even once. When people call my phone, it is warranted.
Telephones remain the best way to contact emergency services, or settle things which you have no option to settle in person.
Not the above poster but: it is _so_ much faster to figure out what somebody is doing wrong like this.
My first preference is a screenshare or video conference, so I can see what they see. Second is a phone call. Third is live chat like IRC or Slack and emails are a distant last place.
The same reason why sometimes meetings are actually important and faster to come to a decisions than email or chat. When you have all the stakeholders in front of each other, either physically or virtually, information is disseminated and decisions come together much quicker.
But the average person can’t type faster than they can talk. Generally a conversation has two sides and typing forces both sides to express themselves in a much slower manner, the time you save reading you will waste typing
Typing forces people to think before they act. It is marvelous. Synchronous communication is overrated. A well written message of a few sentences can replace an hour of talking.
The 'well written' part of that is what many people seem to struggle with. It can sometimes take over an hour to produce just a paragraph or two containing a 'well written' message with the right style, optics, tone, and connotations, spending time checking the spelling, punctuation, grammar, and factual content for accuracy and readability. A hastily thrown together couple of sentences with spelling errors, unexplained abbreviations and acronyms, and perhaps even missing some important detail will cause more damage and waste more time than that hour long phone conversation.
Good- this gives both parties the opportunity to boil down the information into the most important parts, and verify those important parts for accuracy.
Maybe this is an individual thing but I'd rather talk on the phone for any important conversation. For example, if I need to contact my bank for something, I'm always going to choose a phone call over chat. A phone call with a follow-up email if needed.
What makes the audio medium more 'important' to you? If 1:1 is important, what if you were provided the direct email address of a representative at the company? What are you able to convey over the phone that you can't directly via some other method?
I think the instant feedback is the most important thing for me. If I want to convey something that is a bit important for me, I need to get it done and move on to something else. I can tick off that item in my mental checklist immediately. With an email or chat, there is a delay. And there is no guarantee of feedback. I need to switch to another task knowing that this one isn't done yet.
I can understand this for some things; for others, the phone is an interface to an email. Can you give an example?
"We'll send a service technician to you as soon as we can!"
-> Effectively an email/form that I myself could have sent
"I updated your account with this new information."
-> Effectively an email/form that I myself could have sent
"What does the error message say?"
-> Better conveyed through email/chat
If you feel like your requests are being ignored over non-phone mediums, then that sounds like a failure of the organization and not email/text/chat as a medium, at least that's how I see it.
I agree with you. This is not a normal response (unless he's joking):
>Recently, when I was at mum’s alone, the house phone rang. I didn’t answer it. It rang again immediately. I didn’t answer it. It rang again immediately. I stood over it, willing it to stop, palms sweating. The stand-off was only broken when mother texted me to tell me to answer the phone. I hate telephones.
I have an anxiety disorder (GAD), so here's some personal anecdote...
My fear of phone is more among the line of "I might miss something _very_ important if I don't answer immediately." Unsolicited phone calls, and sometimes non-important phone calls make me very annoyed/angry to the point that sometimes I started yelling at caller over the phone. I know I shouldn't.
However, at the same time, I'm also scared of answering the phone from known or unknown callers since I _don't know_ what they're calling me for. Even such call is expected, I always assume they're to tell me a bad news. I'm fully aware it's absurd, but it's uncontrollable.
Please don't do internet psychiatric diagnosis on HN. Like accusations of astroturfing and shillage, it does far more harm than good, even accounting for the few cases where it might be right.
So how are you supposed to intelligently take in an article like this if you can't speculate on the causes of the trauma he reports? "Diagnosing" someone is by definition done by an expert. Having a suspicion as to the cause of something (even if that cause might be a mental disorder), is something regular people do, in order to make good decisions.
Also the desire to regard himself as an otherwise confident person (even superior to the majority!) seems to be very strong:
> In many polls, people list their number one fear as “public speaking”, beating out “death” by some margin. Not me.
Perhaps for this reason the fear of talking to a stranger must be so strongly suppressed.
Personally, I also often feel uncomfortable when accepting a call from an unknown number, but I try to lean into the pain and pick up nevertheless. I actually think of my phone as something like a therapeutic device that allows me to practice talking to strangers and little by little the feeling of uncomfortableness will fade away...
I hate phones and I'm an extrovert. I've cold-called people, asking for money, aka fund raising. So I know too well why strangers are calling me. If I recognize the soliciting campaign, I'll text back "How much?" But I only pick up the phone if someone's in my contacts. If I'm in the mood.
Unsolicited or unexpected phone calls are annoying, but this guy has an anxiety disorder and should probably attend CBT or psychotherapy as it is obviously significantly impacting his life in a negative way.
Also, text is not always a the best way of communicating- a lot of information is conveyed in someone’s voice which is often difficult to put on paper. It can also be way faster to speak to someone, particularly where a problem is a little complex and requires information to be exchanged between both parties multiple times.
Have you considered not diagnosing mental illnesses in HN comments? Let alone offering "treatment advice" on a case you know nothing about, without having spoken to the person in question?
Yes this isn’t the place for diagnoses, merely speculation and advice. That said, I am certain that if he repeated his post verbatim or in summary to his GP they would refer him to a therapy service.
Its ironic that his anxiety prevents him from getting diagnosed / treated for it. Probably quite common in mental health.
He spent the best part of a day compiling a spreadsheet of possible answers to a conversation, the wrote a lengthy blog post telling us about it. That is not normal.
Sure it's normal for people to make an assessment on other people. Some of those people fall outside the bell curve.
The middle of the bell curve for a particular trait (e.g. talking on the telephone) is normal - so about 90% of the population.
You want to redefine the word normal. OK, sure. What should I use? Different? Strange? Unique? Flower? Snowflake? I don't know. Sounds pretty odd behaviour to me. Not wrong, not bad, not dirty. Just weird. Odd. Not normal.
Have you done/read any studies on people's telephone behaviour? No? Then how can you speculate about what does and doesn't fall within 2 standard deviations of the mean?
> Recently, when I was at mum’s alone, the house phone rang. I didn’t answer it. It rang again immediately. I didn’t answer it. It rang again immediately. I stood over it, willing it to stop, palms sweating.
Sweating palms is a fear response. It's adrenaline and fight / flight. It's pathological, it interferes with his day to day life, and he deserves safe effective evidence based treatment.
The lack of information in voice is sometimes a boon. If I am annoyed, I can nevertheless always write perfectly politely, but I cannot always keep the annoyance out of my voice.
I agree. I loathe telephones, I also dislike speaking in public, and to people. None the less, I find the inflection, tone, rate of speech all add to meaningful communication. I hate my own voice, so I dislike speaking, but if I find comfort with whom I am speaking, I find it pleasurable, and perhaps more informative than else. It is the human level of it.
Most of the time I'm with you, but it works both ways.
I accidentally started a fight on HN by typing the exact opposite of my views, or at least something that could apparently be interpreted that way. I don't think I would have been misunderstood in the same manner in speech.
In speech your voice determines your tone. In text your reader determines your tone.
Internet psychiatric diagnosis is not ok in HN comments. As a trope it is perhaps second only to you're-the-shill-no-you're-the-shill in the degradation it causes to discussion. And consider that the author posted this, so you're talking about someone in the room.
I'm sure you didn't mean it that way, but it's still something we all need to have the discipline and good taste to avoid. If we have to we'll add it to https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, but I'd rather avoid having a laundry list of verbotens.
It seems a shame that someone with a very treatable mental health problem should continue to suffer a limited life just because we're all too polite to say "have you thought about CBT?"
I do wonder what you'd say if someone described a physical health problem and people suggested they go see a physical health doctor.
You're making a series of assumptions here: that the problem can be accurately assessed this way, that the commenter is qualified to do so, that a message board comment is a suitable medium for such a message, and that the noise of this being an internet argument trope wouldn't drown out the signal of human concern. That's a lot of slack to cut "this guy has an anxiety disorder".
Nothing wrong with someone posting their own stuff, if it's good. I haven't read this article, but presumably lots of HN upvoters have assessed it that way.
>Nothing wrong with someone posting their own stuff, if it's good. I haven't read this article, but presumably lots of HN upvoters have assessed it that way.
I didn't intend to imply there was anything wrong with it, I was only sharing an observation.
And yet, a number of people felt compelled to downvote me because of it.
I noticed that people of my age (30+) who don’t take unknown calls usually feel inner insecurities that influence (or cause) their unhappy lives. It may be debt, unmet responsibilities, fear of being abused, etc. I can remember the time when landlines were new and everyone was excited to take a call and to speak to someone who’s not even around.
The story also reminds me an old joke/anecdote. English gentlemen club, a gentleman naps in a chair near the fireplace. His boots are almost on fire. One man notices that, but the club etiquette disallows one to speak to the person he doesn’t know. After looking for pretty long he finally finds someone who at least knows the name of that gentleman and is able to speak to him. They wake him up and after a greeting the gentleman who knows him says: “Dear Sir, it is rainy weather today, and this fireplace is conveniently hot. By the way, I’m sad to tell you that your left boot is already burned down.”
I think that author puts too many gentle ceremony into just a short call.
I think what landlines were used for when they were first rolled out are very different from what cellphones are used for today. Snail mail, for me today is almost exclusively junk mail. I still have occasional formal notices from my bank or companies I do business with and a few times a year a seasonal card from family. I bet my attitude towards mail differs from people's attitudes 50 years ago. I think the same goes for telephone calls.
I believe there’s a “churning” where a medium is first abandoned for the most informal, and usually pleasant, conversation, leaving the old medium only for the unp,easentries of life, such as bills or death notices.
Google itself suspects that these are spam calls, because it pops up a bright red "SUSPECTED SPAM CALLER" warning when the phone begins ringing. And yet, I have found no option to have the phone automatically decline the call. There's not even an option to silence the ringer for any call not from my contacts; I actually had to disable my ringer for all callers, by default, and then manually, one at a time, set a custom ringtone for each of my contacts.
This is completely absurd. Why is it so hard to configure my phone to only allow my friends to interrupt me at any moment of the day, rather than any rando? Turns out, I might also hate telephones.