If you call me, please, for the love of god, leave a voicemail.

The BBQ Pit
1

I just got a call from my cell phone, which showed up as “PRIVATE” and since it’s a cell phone, and almost 1:30 in the AM, I’m 99% certain it’s not a telemarketer. Now since I don’t answer my phone unless I know who it is, I let it go to voicemail. Do I get a voicemail from them, though? No. I just get a text message saying “Please call.” Not a voicemail saying who this person is…just a stupid text message saying “Please call.” I don’t even know if they reached the right number or not. I sent a text back saying “Who is this?” but I’ve not gotten a reply. I even took it a step further by plugging the number into google, and got some nursery in Oregon. This is very confusing to me. Please, please, please! If you call me, and I don’t answer, it’s probably because I don’t recognize the number. If I don’t answer and you want me to call you back, leave a message letting me know who the fuck you are! sigh I’m assuming that perhaps it was a wrong number, but even then…

Gah, I don’t know. It just pisses me off when I don’t know who the hell’s calling me.

2

Send the phone spiders!

3

(For the uninitiated)

"Dr. Weird: [as an answering machine message] Gentlemen. You have reached Dr. Weird’s residence. Now speak at the tone!
Telemarketer: Hello, Dr. Wire… Wired… Wi… Weird.
Dr. Weird: Steve, send the phone spiders.
Telemarketer: This is Jay Edwards with, uh, Chauna Construction Company. With Spring here, we thought you might be interested in a new deck. AHH! Spiders! Get 'em off! Get 'em off!
Dr. Weird: No, I guess we’re not interested. Ah ha ha ha!

4

Ehh, I’ll just call back later.
:smiley:

Happens to me all the time. I probably do it sometimes myself, tho, so I won’t complain too much.

5

Aaaaand now I’ll have the Aqua Teen theme song stuck in my head all day.

My name iiiis…

6

If caller ID is blocked (ie, “Private”), how can you send a message back? :confused:

But I agree with the sentiment. I make a point of telling people not to expect a call-back if they don’t leave a message. Some people think that as soon as you see their caller ID, you are obliged to return the phone call. Hey, if you couldn’t be bothered to tell me why you called, it couldn’t have been important.

7

Mebbe the problem lies in your user name?

8

Don’t know about the States but over here if you hid your outgoing number so it shows up as “Private” when you call it still shows your number on any SMS you send.

As to the OP I agree 100%. I never answer a “private” number. Fuck’em if they don’t want to show me their number but want to call me. I also hate the immediate hang-up message.

9

Oh man, this is a total pet-peeve of mine. I can’t stand it when I get a call from either a number I don’t recognize or a “new call” number (it just says “new call” there’s no actual number displayed) and they leave no message. The beauty of caller ID is I don’t have to answer the phone if I don’t know who it is. The downside of it is it drives me freaking NUTS if I don’t know who’s calling me (i.e. no message). I’ll actually stew over it, trying to figure out who it could’ve been (never have to worry about it being a telemarketer since I pretty much only have a cell phone).

I think I just have to start always answering my phone now, or else I’m bound to have a nervous breakdown one of these days.

10

I sometimes use Caller ID to not answer when I do know who it is. Some days it just ain’t worth the bother.

11

I started getting calls on my cell every afternoon for someone named Ruben Sosa, who obviously is not me and, since I’ve had this number for four years, presumably put a phony number down so some creditor is chasing him down. What was totally aggravating was that it was a computer, and finally to stop the daily calls I listened to the message, and option 4 was for “If we’ve reached this number in error, please hold for an operator” – except of course after holding for about two minutes I was then told, “We’re sorry, all operators are busy right now.” :smack: So I finally actually called back on the number they’d been calling me on and yelled at them about the whole thing and they went away. But it wasted at least 15 minutes of my life on aggravation.

The only people who I’ll call back who don’t leave voicemails are my husband or my kids. Anyone else, no message, no callback.

12

The only time I don’t answer my phone is if it’s someone I know and don’t want to talk to them.

I can’t stand not answering unknown numbers. I never have had a telemarketer call my cell phone in the 3 years I’ve had it.

13

Oddly, 99% of the time when I get an “unknown number” call, it’s the phone people themselves calling to nag me about a late bill. Why doesn’t their own number show up, for crying out loud?

14

Same here. That’s why I have voicemail, so that people can leave me a message if their call is important. They don’t leave a message, well, I guess they didn’t really need to talk to me that badly.

15

Probably because they want people to pick up the phone.

16

Assuming your asking a serious question, it’s because they are dialling through a switchboard, not on a direct line.

17

Oooh, I was just thinking about this today. PET PEEVE.

And yet I hate answering calls from numbers I don’t know, even though I don’t know why b/c it’s not like I’m wanted by the law, collection agencies, or pyschotic exes. For me it’s like answering the door without looking through the peephole; it’s this weird thing where I somehow need to know who it is before I answer it.

So a lot of times I ignore calls from strange numbers, but then I sit there getting all irritated b/c they didn’t leave a voicemail and now I’m driven mad with curiosity to know who it was.

Basically, I am never happy.

:stuck_out_tongue:

The flip side of this pet peeve, though, is the Friend Who Says Too Much. One of my girlfriends will call and leave these one-sided conversations on my voicemail. Not just “Call me back.” Oh, no. I get, “Well, I was at Whole Foods today and my credit card got denied and I KNOW I have money on that card, and the clerk got all snippy with me when I told her to run it again, and the line behind me got really long, so I called my credit card company, and they said…”

This is on my voicemail. The whole freakin’ story of her day. It’s like a voice-email.

And then another girlfriend of mine has a habit of acting like my voicemail is an answering machine and I can hear her live. “Hellloooo! Audrey! Hello? Earth to Audrey! I need to talk to you!”

I’m pretty sure she does it just to be cute, but I’m not entirely certain.

And another friend of mine does what I call The Drive-By. This is where your phone rings just long enough for the number to appear, and then stops ringing. You wait for it to ring again, but it doesn’t. So I sit there going, “Hmmm, should I call him back? Or did he just hit the wrong speed-dial button or something?”

I whined about it to him and now he does it on purpose just to irritate me.

Ah, the joys of modern “conveniences.”