Do you pick up calls from a 1-800 number?

[Arrendajo]

I don’t answer calls from numbers I don’t recognize nor any 1 800 numbers. If it’s someone who actually wants to talk to me personally, they’ll leave a message. I’ve been getting more and more unknown calls now with the election heating up, at least several per day. I ignore them. It causes me exactly zero anxiety.

[CCitizen]

I got a 1-800 number of my own at Freedom Voice at $10/month.

[HeXen]

I don’t pick up any calls period unless it has a name attached to it from my contacts list. Also I found the best way to avoid bs calls is to change your number often. Since I use a Tracphone prepaid, I just let my time run out and they give me a new number when I buy a new card to activate it again.

[Kaio]

@Jophiel

People who are getting 4-6 calls a day should look into some form of call blocking. Chances are, you’re not getting 40 unique numbers calling you per week but rather 6-8 people who keep calling. If you have phone through your cable company, you can add the numbers to a list to block them, I think AT&T has a service to block specific numbers or get a land line phone that has its own “Block Call” list so it won’t ring and bother you if Rachel from Card Services comes calling. You should be able to winnow out a lot of those spam calls over time.

My phone number is already on the national Do Not Call list (haha! Oh, I’ve tried filing reports at DoNotCall.gov too. Yeah, that’s useful.), and I can only block callers one number at a time. Which means writing the number down and typing out a text to my provider, which is slow (30 seconds total?) because phones are not built for touch typing. And then the next week three new numbers (possibly the same spam companies, you know how they like to mix it up) pop up to take its place. So you can guess how often I have the time to do this over and over again, especially since I shouldn’t have to be doing it in the first place, and will still be doing it next week and the next and forevermore or until the FTC decides to enforce the DNC list with some teeth.

Or I can take less than 1 second to hit the “ignore/silence” button on my phone.

[BigT]

@NAF1138

I always answer, but in my case I guess that’s professional courtesy. Calling people who you don’t know sucks no matter why you are calling, so I try to be a bright spot in their day.

Part of my job entails calling people who responded to an ad my company placed to set up appointments to meet with them. I have literally hundreds of people to call on any given day. I never leave a message because I don’t have time to waste leaving messages. If they want to talk to me they will answer the phone, if not I will call back later when I have time. Sometimes that’s later that day, sometimes it’s not for a month or two. The easiest way to get me to stop calling you though is to just take a minute to let me identify myself (if you hang up on me before I tell you who I am I am calling you RIGHT back.) and then say you don’t want to talk to me after all. I don’t want to spend more than 90 seconds on the phone with any single person, so I am not going to fight you and I will stop calling because it’s wasting my time.

This won’t work for every caller, but maybe it will help you to with some if you understand how people who make these kind of phone calls think.

Leaving a message takes less time than calling me back. And once you leave that message, you know I will either hear it and call back, or I’m not interested. So any further call is useless.

Heck, the voicemail is itself almost a waste of time–the only issue is if the person doesn’t have Caller ID. If they do, they have a callback number and the name of the company for the ad they responded to. That’s enough for me to call you back.

Answering the phone and talking to you doesn’t save me time, and that call will last longer than a basic callback message, so it’s not really saving you time, either.

It sounds a lot more like you’re being the squeaky wheel, calling many times and hoping that I’ll get tired of it and answer the phone. But, while I can’t speak with others, that will not be a pleasant calling experience for me or for the person on the other line.

So, if you have any control over it, please rethink your strategy. At most, call twice, and leave a brief message the second time.

[NAF1138]

@BigT

Leaving a message takes less time than calling me back. And once you leave that message, you know I will either hear it and call back, or I’m not interested. So any further call is useless.

Heck, the voicemail is itself almost a waste of time–the only issue is if the person doesn’t have Caller ID. If they do, they have a callback number and the name of the company for the ad they responded to. That’s enough for me to call you back.

Answering the phone and talking to you doesn’t save me time, and that call will last longer than a basic callback message, so it’s not really saving you time, either.

It sounds a lot more like you’re being the squeaky wheel, calling many times and hoping that I’ll get tired of it and answer the phone. But, while I can’t speak with others, that will not be a pleasant calling experience for me or for the person on the other line.

So, if you have any control over it, please rethink your strategy. At most, call twice, and leave a brief message the second time.

You are underestimating the number of people I call and the fact that I am going to be calling you back anyway. I have personally experimented with leaving a message after the first couple of tries instead of just calling back, and the results are the same. But if I leave everyone a 30 second message, over 200 people (and people who really make calls for a living call way more than 200 a day. For me this is something I try to do for less than 6 hours a week so 200 is about my max), that’s over an hour and a half of added call time just on no answers for a statistically insignificant improvement in contact rate.

Believe me, I don’t make this stuff up. It had been studied to death. I don’t work in a call center, but the people who run call centers are most of who you are getting calls from. They work on really thin margins and need to maximize their time.

Now if a machine says that they screen calls I’ll leave a message. Sometimes I’ll leave a message if I don’t have enough people clustered in one area and am desperate to squeeze out an additional appointment. But it’s sort of a Hail Mary thing and if I am short on people to call I can afford the time. I get more people calling back from no message than I ever have from leaving a message though.

[kayaker]

Reported spam