And I don’t mean from telemarketers, of course that is annoying.
But from friends that have chosen to have their Caller ID’s blocked, probably because they have an unlisted number.
Now, when I see “Private Name, Private Number” show up, I have to decide whether it one of my paranoid friends, or someone I’d rather not talk to :mad:
Don’t have caller I’d on my land line, so it doesn’t matter.
On my smart phone if it doesn’t pop up one of my contacts it goes to voice mail.
This is what I do. If I don’t have any idea who it is I won’t answer (unless it’s from the area code where I live).
My wife won’t answer any calls if a name doesn’t pop up.
Yeah, I’ve always wondered (beside telemarketers and the like) what kind of person has caller ID blocking.
What kind of asshole do I have to be to not want someone to know it’s ME calling?
I mean its one thing if you haven’t set it up or whatever but back in the day when caller ID came out it wasn’t long before the option of Caller ID Blocking came into being. WTF?
Doesn’t bother me. What does bother me is people that sit there and say (even if it’s just a number they don’t know) “I don’t know who it is so I’m not going to answer it” while I’m saying “If you just answer the phone, you’ll find out who it is, do you want me to get it for you?”
If you don’t want me to know who you are, then I don’t want to answer your call.
I never understood the old argument people used to use about CallerID being an invasion of their privacy.
If you want to maintain your privacy then why are you calling other people? Would you wear a mask when you are knocking on somebody’s door?
If you aren’t willing to identify yourself then don’t bother calling me, I don’t have time for that kind of bullshit.
My EX did this stupid shit. And stuff like this is part of the reason she is my EX.
Phones rings. Can’t tell who it is. I say “fuck it, if it happens to be someone we know or it is actually important they will leave a message”.
She freaks the fuck out and about kills herself trying the answer the phone before the third ring (that’s a whole nother story).
The kicker? She gets madder than shit if it turns out its a telemarketer or political poll or whatever.
Make up you damn mind woman.
Gawd I hated her fucking bizarre phone behavior.
If you block it (such that it would ordinarily show up as “Private Name Private Number”; I don’t mean spoofing it) my phone won’t even ring. I use anonymous call rejection (*77).
And before anyone chimes in that it is sometimes necessary to block caller id, I know that; in my particular case there is no possible circumstance where it would be necessary to block caller id when calling me.
Something to add. We’ve had to talk to the police department where our family business is located about this. Their number comes up blocked on caller ID when they call.
So, if there’s, say, a break in and they call the owner and the number comes up blocked and you get someone like my mom or sister that won’t answer it, then what? Luckily, I’m next on the list and I will answer it.
We talked to them about that and they said that they do that so when they’re calling a ‘bad guy’ to see if they’re home before they go to serve a warrant or raid the house they don’t want it coming up as POLICE. Which is all well and fine, but they need to have another outgoing line that isn’t blocked for making calls when they should be identified. The police chief said the dispatcher is supposed to be using a *code to unblock the number, but clearly she isn’t.
Now, the PD would leave a message before going on to the next person on the call list, but since the number was blocked you couldn’t hit redial to call them back. That meant trying to remember the number from the voicemail when you’ve just been woken up by a blocked call two minutes ago and now trying to punch that number into your phone from memory and hoping you don’t call the wrong person in the middle of the night.
How about the case I just mentioned above. Your local police department may very well block their caller ID. Is your number anyone’s emergency contact? Kids? Spouse? Parent?
Also, IME we have caller ID at work and get a LOT of calls. I’ve seen some people’s numbers come up blocked once in a while even though they usually don’t. I just assume it’s a fluke/glitch somewhere in the system. I assume if that happened with your phone they would just call back unless the app that you use sends out some kind of outgoing message telling them to unblock caller ID and try again. Hopefully they’ll try again.
In our case, the police can leave a message on our answering machine. I’m not going to answer blocked callers on the extremely slim chance it might be something important.
ETA: For the OP, Caller ID blocking doesn’t annoy me. It just means I don’t have to get up to answer the phone.
When caller ID began to appear, I found it weird. I opted to not see people’s ID nor send my own. It was many years ago, but I never bothered to change it.
The parents and emergency contacts of a surprising number of my middle school’s students have the same policy. Our school has an extremely old, creaky phone system, and when we call, it will show up as one of three phone numbers, only one of which is the “official” school number.
…and the people described above will very frequently hit “redial” and demand to know who called them when I answer the phone with the name of the school. “Did they leave a message?” I will always ask. “Um…I don’t know, I didn’t check,” is the typical answer. Then they expect me to spend ten minutes taking a poll of all the administrative staff to see if maybe someone was trying to reach them about their kid. Sometimes they even want me to call their kid from class to solve this ultra-important mystery that could have been avoided if they’d just answer their damn phone (or ignore the call - or listen to voicemail).
Occasionally, it’s someone who doesn’t have a child at our school. Then I get to patiently explain the concept of how a twelve-year-old might misdial an unfamiliar phone (they aren’t allowed to use their cell phones at school).
Answer your phone; don’t answer your phone. But those are the two choices. If you don’t have enough curiosity to pick up the phone, don’t call the number back. And, I suppose, don’t get upset if we’ve had your child transported to a hospital without letting you know, because sometimes it IS an emergency.
Nope. I am no one’s emergency contact. I am single, with no dependents, and live in an apartment. I am quite certain the police would find a way to contact me if they decided they urgently needed to.
We’re allowed to use foul language here in IMHO, aren’t we? As long as it refers to some off-board 3rd party, like spammers and trolls, right? Here goes . . . . .
Imagine that you get LOTS AND LOTS of spam e-mail. And imagine that your e-mail app has NO spam filter. So you get, say, 100 messages in your in-box every day, of which maybe 5 are for real. How long will it take before you just give-the-fuck-up on ever using e-mail?
Well, my phone has gotten like that, from all those shit-fucking “Unknown callers”.
It seems that someone calling himself “Bjorn Thor” (or something like that) has every collection agent in the country chasing his damn ass, and he is giving out MY phone number as his. (Possibly some such dude actually had this number once upon a time.) So I am getting an average of 5 in-coming calls a day. The VAST majority of them are from “Unknown Caller”. If I answer, I rarely get a live person. If I get a live person, they will not tell me who they are. (If I ask, they just hang up.) If I let my answering machine take it, they hang up without leaving a message, or else leave a lengthy robo-message that quickly fills up my answering machine. There is no stopping them.
Meanwhile, I get about 1 incoming call a month from anyone that I might actually want to talk to. (No, I’m not the most social butterfly on the block.)
So I finally let my answering machine fill up and stay full (and eventually I just disconnected it), and I turned the ringer off. I don’t want to be bothered with phone calls anyway. Once in a while I look at the incoming call log, and if I see a recognizable name, maybe I’ll call back when I get a round tuit. My phone is still useful for making outgoing calls of course. But the shit-fucking “Unknown Callers” have hijacked my phone to the point that it’s useless for receiving incoming calls.
Stay tuned for my next post, in which I will ask for some specific practical advice . . .
Okay, here’s what I want to do with my phone. Can somebody please tell me if there is a phone answering machine on the market that does this?
Y’all know about all the sophisticated filters you can set up for your incoming e-mail, right? I want a phone answering machine that provides something like that for filtering incoming phone calls.
Can I get such a device? At a reasonable cost?
I don’t want an app that I run on my PC, where I plug my phone into the PC’s phone jack. I want a stand-alone answering machine. If my DSL modem/router with all its sophistication can fit in a physical box the size of an answering machine, then so can an actual fancy-schmancy answering machine.
I want features like this:
[ul][li] White-list of phone numbers I will answer. (Take message if I don’t answer.)[/li][li] Grey-list of phone numbers to answer automatically and take message, without ringing my phone.[/li][li] Black-list of numbers to NOT answer. Even better, pick up these calls then immediately disconnect. In any case, don’t even ring my phone.[/li][li] Calls can be filtered on either the Number or the Name field of the incoming ID.[/li][li] Filters can contain wild-cards, like 718-234-??? or 614-???-??? (and likewise, allow wild-cards on the Name field too).[/li][li] Large enough memory that these lists can contain fairly many numbers.[/li][li] Specific pre-programmed codes to represent all calls saying “Unknown Caller” or “Out of State Caller” or “Private Caller” or other common generic no-ID calls.[/li][li] Options to create additional classes (that is, lists of numbers or names) with some other kinds of special treatment.[/li][li] Differing ring-tones for different numbers or classes, or different voice-mail greeting.[/li][li] Here’s a biggie: Option to challenge certain incoming calls. That is, a CAPTCHA-like function. Automated voice answers, says “Please enter 38 [randomly chosen two digits] to complete your call.” Caller must respond correctly within 30 seconds or call is disconnected.[/li][li] Even better: “Please enter initial letters of the person you are trying to reach”. Caller must enter the correct two digits. This will reject even live callers who are trying to reach someone other than me (like all those Bjorn Thor callers).[/li][li] If there is some standard protocol to recognize emergency callers (like Police), then provide for that. If no such protocol exists, it ought to; in the meantime, they can damn well send me a telegram.[/li][li] Possibility to export the entire configuration to a USB memory device.[/li][/ul]
I’ve recently taken to telling anybody I give my cell number to call me twice in a row and then I will know to call them back even if I cant tell who it is.
NASA it aint but I guess its a start.
Senegoid, your best bet might just be to get a new phone number and start fresh. Actually, this would probably be a good time to abandon the landline and just have a cell phone.
I mean, if you don’t even answer your phone and never check the messages and the only thing you use your phone for is outgoing calls, I’m guessing you’re not to attached to the number.
Yes. I’ve had this number, with this problem, for several years now, and I’m really getting ready to get a new number. And I’ll damn well consider transferring as much of my business as possible from AT&T to any other provider I can find (I’ve heard good things about Sonic).
Typical problem with getting a new number is that they eventually get contaminated. Just like your brand-spanking-new e-mail address eventually (somehow) leaks out onto all the world’s spam lists, likewise a land-line number gradually accumulates a retinue of junk callers that just can’t be gotten rid of. (And it was 100X worse before the Do-Not-Call-List, which actually cut down the junk calls dramatically!)
I am sort of attached to having a land-line because I get my internet via DSL on this same line. I don’t have any other access to internet here (and I don’t want to get cable TV just so I can get internet with it). I don’t even have a TV, and never did, and never regretted it.
Ask your phone company about “Naked DSL”. At least that’s what it used to be called when you wanted DSL only, with no phone service. Your cable company should have something similar. The problem you might run into is that the price in the internet alone might jump without bundling it with phone/TV. OTOH, going to a VOIP phone (or cell) might make that worth it in the end. Either because the net cost is lower or the stress for you is lower.