Does Caller ID Blocking (Private Name, Private Number) annoy you?

Most of the people I know communicate via text message, so the land line is on silent with no voicemail. On the times that a unknown caller shows up on the cellphone, I simply send it to call heaven with the appropriate button.

In another decade I imagine most business’s will have wrapped their heads around this concept and adjusted their way of doing business.

Declan

If we don’t recognize the name or number, we don’t answer the phone. Fortunately none of our friends block their ID. If they did they wouldn’t be able to get through.

Doesn’t annoy me at all, if a name doesn’t show up I don’t answer. If a name shows up there’s still a 75% chance I won’t answer.

Dig

Pick up the phone!

I’ve called you 4 times now :slight_smile:

Were you married to my mother?

She does the same thing.

I never answer my phone at home. Too cheap for caller ID. If it’s someone I know I pick up the phone.

Not interested in knowing who is calling my cell phone if they are not in my contact list.

“What’s a home phone Grandpa? Is that like when you have your smart phone with you but you are sitting at home?”

If my smart phone does not recognize your number I ain’t answering the call. Leave a message and I will check it in just a few minutes and decide if I want to call you back.

We have never had such peace in our house until we got rid of the land line. I don’t believe in emergencies. If you think you have an emergency I have people who handle that, their number is 911, call them, then call me and leave a message.

Have you looked at Google Voice? I haven’t looked at it in a while, but I believe it has a lot of what you’re looking for. I know that it allows you to group certain contacts together and give that group a unique outgoing message. Their block caller feature is nifty – once you’ve blocked a number, if it calls again they hear the “disconnected” message. Your Google Voice number can be set to ring any existing phone you want, too, including ringing multiple phones at once (home and work, say).

Anyway, to the OP: no, doesn’t bother me, but I won’t answer it either. I figure if it’s important, they’ll leave a message, and if it’s not, I’ve saved myself the bother of hanging up on them.

Not entirely surprisingly, I can recall exactly one instance in my life where I actually got a message from a PRIVATE number (and it was an office I was doing business with). Aside from that, none of them leave a message.

It’s the thing that still works when the towers go down in a disaster.

Apparently you ARE my daughter? in law. Shocking as that is:)

Geez my EX was batshit crazy phone wise.

Like I mentioned in the previous post she would about kill herself trying to answer the phone. She created a fracking bowl shaped depression on the couch playing fracking Farmville 18 hours a day.

We had the couch (with a biologically created depression) and a biologic entity filling said depression. In front of the couch was a glass table. And of course the source of the Farmville depression creating device, a laptop computer on a “tv tray”. Now of course this laptop running 18 hours a day needed power. And internet. And a mouse. And a printer connection. So, we had the sofa. A biologically created and filled dent on the sofa. A glass table. And the “tv tray” to support all this between the glass table and the sofa with the depression. And all the damn wiring it needed to do said things.

So, when the phone rang the EX acted like it was the call of your lifetime. She would nearly kill herself and or tear shit up trying to get over the wires to get to the phone ASAP. With the grace of a drunk assed water buffalo.

Now, keep in mind, she could go an extra 3 feet to the left and avoid the wires and the glass table by going to the left of the table rather than the right where all the shit was.

After a couple hundred/thousand times of this I’d had enough stupidity.

I finally told her something to the effect of “If you fucking fall and or fall through that glass table bleeding like a stuck pig rushing to get to the phone, I MIGHT hand you the phone to call 911” before I walk out the door".

She got butthurt but she also quite doing that shit.

Just as cell phones are the thing that still works when the phone lines are ripped down in a disaster. Or the power lines if all your home phones are cordless.

I don’t get the excuse of having an unlisted number. If it’s a social call, and you are calling me, yet you don’t trust me with your phone number, what does that say about you? I can’t call you, but you can call me? WTF?

For emergency services, I’ve never known any that block the number. They just replace it with the number you’re supposed to call to reach them, just like all businesses do. And even if you do have to block the number for some reason, you can still put a name in, so I know who you are.

There is no anti-SPAM service for phones, so not answering numbers I don’t recognize is as close as I can get. So, yeah, it does bug me a bit when you deliberately try to circumvent that system, particularly when you have alternatives.

Fortunately, every single time I’ve answered a Private Caller, the number has been hidden for the reason you think it is–so you don’t know who is calling. I have no problem being mad at such people.

the lions share of phone lines are buried fiber optics. and the base unit of most cordless phones act as a speakerphone. I have corded phones in my house.

the problem with cell phones is that even in a densely tower’d area you can overload them in an emergency. While that is also possible with a land line I’ve never had it happen. I have been to large public events where there were too many people for the cell towers to handle. Organizers of repeat events seem to have figured this out because I’ve seen portable cell towers brought in to handle the load as of late.

Anyway, I’ve doubled my chances of communication in an emergency and I use a land line for DSL.

Okay, I’ll have to read up on it.

I only get unknown calls from one person. And that’s my wife.

Her workplace, a workplace with thousands of employees and thousands of phones, does not wish any of them to take return calls. Nobody else who calls me is [employed by anybody] that stupid.

Mother’s Day morning. Pre-cellphone days, that used to happen. Probably not any more, though.

Now get off my lawn (and I’ll stay off yours).

As noted somewhere above, Caller ID blocking can be turned off on a call by call basis. If someone you know calls you with it blocked, just ask them to include the code with your phone number in their contacts. This may involve you finding out what that code is (I don’t know it offhand) and finding out precisely how they need to enter it (you may need to program a pause after entering the code). I would not be surprised to learn that some phones have a feature that allows you turn off blocking when you dial a number by simply checking a box in the contact entry. If they don’t have that feature, they should.

Pffth, anything starting with “Bill” definitely goes into the do not answer pile :).

Even 867 5309?