For the past month or so, I’ve been getting calls at all hours by this really annoying Chinese woman. She usually calls my cell phone at night but today, she called me at 6:30am and has called me about 8 times already, each time yelling really loud Mandarin (I can’t speak Mandarin) before hanging up. She waits another few minutes then calls again.
She’s done this every few weeks or so, but today was the first time she called me repeatedly and at 6:30 in the freaking morning!
Is there any recourse that I can take without having to turn my phone off when I sleep or change my number? My phone isn’t able to have a different ringtone (i.e. none) for each person, it’s either sound, vibrate or off.
Try calling your provider. If that doesn’t work, perhaps you can buy a new phone that has the option of selecting different (no) ringtones for different callers. It’s a pain in the, but better than having to change your number.
You’ll need to call your cell phone provider. This all depends on the way that they have set up the tariffs in your area.
In my area, call blocking is available on land lines, but when I called to see how to do it on my cell phone they said they simply weren’t allowed to offer that service here.
I had the same experience. I was told by my cell phone provider that blocking numbers for cell phones was just not possible (at least here in Ontario).
They told me my only option was to change my number. I decided against it and instead yelled back at the offending caller. They never called again.
I’ve just gotta ask – what the hell is the deal with the phone system here? I had to add a “1” to every telephone number in my cell phone book because the Bell system otherwise bitches at me about a number being long distance. Well, who cares? If it knows it’s long distance, just patch the damn call through.
Now on a land line I want to make a call, so I dial 1 plus the ten digits and get screamed at because it’s not a long distance call, and I shouldn’t be dialing a one.
Finally, when I’m in different areas of the GTA I either can or can’t use my cell phone’s phonebook again because suddenly a number is no longer long distance and I shouldn’t be dialing the 1.
Holy crap – we used to have all of these inconveniences with analogue switches back in America, but cell phones have never cared a whit about using or not using the digit 1. From terrestrial lines, you can unfailingly dial 1 plus area code and reach your next door neighbo(u)r if you want to use more than seven digits.
The real pain in the butt is when receiving an incoming call not in the phonebook – it shows up with only the 10 digits, without a 1. Now to call the guy back, I can’t just hit the call button. I’ve got to write the number down and manually call the person back (okay, part of the blame is the crappy Motorola phone that doesn’t have a number edit function).
(I won’t even go into the 15% sales tax, $15 pitchers of beer, bagged milk, and unfailingly beautiful parks system – 51st state, my butt.)
And Balthisar, I hear you. I can’t even BEGIN to tell you the number of problems I’ve had with my wireless service here. I could spend a few hours ranting about the time, two weeks ago, when my phone was inexplicably routing callers to some other person’s voice mail. They’d call MY number, it would ring, and then SOME OTHER PERSON’S VOICE MAIL WOULD PICK UP! I don’t even know how that’s possible, but there it is.
And it doesn’t matter who you go with. Rogers is my current provider, despite the fact that they are possibly the most incompetent, evil, horrible company on the planet. But then again, I think the same thing about Bell. Sigh.
Sorry for the hijack, I got a little carried away there.
What if you learn to say “you have the wrong number. If you call again I will call the police.” in Mandarin?
And how do you know it’s Mandarin? If you know enough of Mandarin to know it IS Mandarin, you should have no problem learning how to say something threatening in it
Welcome to the horror of inconsistent dialing plans.
That’s dialing, not numbering… the North American Numbering Plan, which both Canada and the USA use, is rather consistent. But dialing has to do with what additional digits you put around the actual phone number so that you can dial it from a given location.
Ontario landline phones have “toll alerting”, which means that you dial a 1 before the number for long distance (i.e. a “toll” call, one which is charged by the minute), and you do not dial a 1 before a local call (one which is not timed, may be of any duration, and is included in the flat rate you pay each month for basic service.
What’s more, Ontario’s toll alerting is mandatory: you cannot dial a 1 before a local call.
When toll alerting was implelented, you could dial a toll call in the same area code using only the seven-digit local number. Thus, you would dial as follows:
a local call in the same area code: XXX XXXX.
a toll call in the same area code: 1 XXX XXXX.
a toll call in a different area code: 1 XXX XXX XXXX.
Area codes and local numbers were arranged so that the landline phone system could automatically detect when an area code was being dialed, and thus ‘know’ how many digits you were dialing. The system would know when enough numbers had accumulated, so that the call could be automatically connected. (In earlier versions of the switching equipment, each individual digit drove part of the switching system as it was dialed!)
There was very little local calling to another area code, but when it did occur, there were special arrangements of local numbers so that you would only need to dial the seven-digit local number in any case, ignoring the different area code: XXX XXXX.
Cellphones are different. Since they have a send button, the user lets the system know how many numbers there are, and the system does not need to figure it out. Many cellphones store numbers as 1 XXX XXX XXXX, and GSM phones even store them in full international format with a leading + (to indicate the international access code).
People dial stored numbers from their phones’ memories, and the cellphone system figures out how to dial the call based on the location of the user and the destination.
Meanwhile, among the landline phones, time passed.
They got rid of seven-digit toll calls. Now, all toll calls had to include the area code, even if the destination number was in the same area code as the caller. (Some of our area codes are pretty damn big.) So for a toll call, we always dialed 1 XXX XXX XXXX.
Then local ten digit dialing came in.
In local areas with more than one area code, we now dial XXX XXX XXXX, whether its in the same area code or not. (The Toronto area has four area codes accessible locally from downtown Toronto: 416, 647, 905, and 289.)
Ten-digit dialing is spreading to greater and greater areas. Of the dozen or so area codes in Ontario, only 807 and 705 do NOT have ten-digit dialing.
So now we have 1 XXX XXX XXX for a toll call and XXX XXX XXXX for a local call.
Long-distance phone rates are much cheaper than they used to be, with many flat-rate plans covering all of the province, all of Canada, or even all of North America.
The need to warn of long-distance toll calls is much less than it used to be. Mandatory toll alerting is no longer necessary!
All NANP calls in Ontario should be dialable as 1 XXX XXX XXXX, local or not. Local calls can omit the 1 if they want to.
It’s not like they can’t do it; the system is smart enough to distinguish the calls and alert the caller. Just put the call through. I don’t care whether it’s toll or not.
The alternative to toll alerting is to use the 1 to indicate that an area code follows. This is widely done in the States. You use the 1 before an area code whether you are dialing a local or a long-distance call.
Since more and more non-toll-alerting areas in the States have ten-digit dialing as well, they end up dialing 1 XXX XXX XXXX for everything.
I believe that the long-term plan is to have everyone do ten-digit dialing. Then we won’t have to worry about whether to include the area code; it’ll just be part of the number. Maybe we can drop the 1 then, and let it just be the country code of the NANP, used only when calling from abroad.
But we should get rid of mantatory toll alerting. Allow “1+the number” on all NANP calls in Ontario!
Hey, Sunspace, good to hear from a phone geek. I am a pseudo-phone geek, so I’m aware of much of what you are saying, still…
I find it incomprehensible why the phone company’s software, if it knows my number needs a “1” (“You must dial a 1 before that number”), why doesn’t it supply the “1” itself?
Conversely, if it knows the number doesn’t need a “1” prefix (“You must not dial a 1 before that number”), why doesn’t it strip it off?
To put it another way, the detection seems 100% accurate, since the suggested remedy is 100% accurate. There is no ambiguity. So why doesn’t the software handle the problem internally? I don’t care what obscure language it is written in, give me a manual and a day and I’ll get it programmed correctly, so why can’t they?
There does seem to be a trend, at least in my area, to fix this (it only took 30 years from my first complaint). Not long ago, if you dialed a LATA number without the 1 when it needed it, or with the 1 when it didn’t, you got an endless ringing and no hint of a problem. You can’t imagine how many friends I thought were never home until I tried dialing another way.
Maybe if we could get Nortel and BCE to pay attention to their actual communications products instead of all that high-level stock manipulation and corporate merging, they could do something about it. I bet it’s already coded, and they just need to change a software parameter to enable it.
I hear enough Mandarin and Cantonese to at least be able to tell the two apart, so I know from her ravings that she speaks Mandarin. My mom speaks a little Mandarin so I called again at 2pm hoping to have my mom be able to tell her it’s a wrong number, but she didn’t pick up. Grr.
I looked at the Cingular forum when she woke me up and there’s no way to block a call to your cell phone. They stated on the forum that it’s just not possible yet. With today’s technology you’d think that simply blocking a phone number was possible! Sigh.
And I don’t understand why you’d keep calling a number if it’s obviously reaching someone that you don’t want to talk to!! Why would you keep calling someone for AN HOUR (and at fucking 6:30am!) if it’s not who you want?? This crazy lady boggles my mind.
It’s most definitely possible, the problem is your provider. I signed up with Vodaphone Japan (now Softbank) about three years ago, and have had this option available since the beginning. I don’t even need to contact them, my phone automatically keeps a record of the last 20 numbers that have called me, and gives me the option to save the number in my address book or reject any future calls from it.
Occasionally, some of these numbers come through (no harassment, just some guy who has a number very close to mine, so I keep getting calls for him), so I’ve assigned them all an address book entry of “Wrong Number.” That way whenever they call, I just check the window on the side, see the name “wrong number”, then put the phone back in my pocket and let it keep vibrating until they go away. I used to get these wrong numbers several times a day, now it’s down to less than once a week.
Wow, thanks for such a great explanation (and sorry to the others for going so far off topic).
So, sounds like my roaming, US cell phone may be at fault, since the network isn’t properly stripping or adding the 1 as required? It just doesn’t get along with whoever the provider is here?
