Don’t want to get us too far off track, but I’d like to pose the question: who, in the age of caller ID, actually answers the phone for any numbers they don’t recognize?
For me, who finds chit chatting on the phone with humans to begin with mildly unpleasant, that would be a big no.
Unfortunately, I often do. I have a kid in school, and the kid generates too frequent of calls home. The school has lots of phones, so no predicting which exact number it will come from. Beyond the school’s phones, the calls could come from a teacher’s cell phone, which means not just local calls, but also a call from wherever the teacher happened to live when they first got a phone.
Any given call gets about 5 seconds to demonstrate it is not a scam. Absolutely no need to try to be polite or convince the scammer of anything, just hang up. Doubly so to avoid arguing with a robot.
Caller ID isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. I’ve missed calls from my kid’s school, medical clinics, service calls, etc because it just came up as the number and no identifying name and I just let it go unanswered. Waiting for and trying to respond to a voicemail didn’t always work out. These days it’s a coin flip if I answer or not, assuming it’s not from Scam Likely. A call at a late hour is probably more likely to get picked up because it’s not going to be a storm window salesman at 11:20 pm.
I don’t know any personally, but I assure you they exist. I don’t get it either. And it’s not olde fartes that grew up with party lines and three digit phone numbers. It’s younger people.
Well, I do.
I get a lot of business calls on my phone, and the vast majority of them are not in my address book. This means that most of them go straight to voice mail, but if I am expecting a call, I will often answer it, even if I don’t recognize the number.
I do - not all the time but sometimes. I figure if it’s a call to tell me my mother or one of my kids is in the hospital, they will leave a voicemail. But if it’s the appliance delivery people calling to tell me I’m next on their list, they might not leave a message and might just go on to the next stop and maybe get back to me later.
While it’s popular these days to act like the phone is a roadside bomb full of scorpions, for many people the phone is just a thing that makes noise, you talk to someone until you don’t want to talk to them anymore then you disconnect. No big deal. I don’t get many calls of any sort (I think backend screening by the carrier blocks a lot) so it just isn’t an issue to answer.
(As I typed this, the phone rang with a number that looked scammy since it was a local prefix and that’s often a spoof to make you think it’s a neighbor. Turns out it was the dental office trying to get up an appointment since they just got an opening. Had I ignored it, I’m sure they would have gone to the next person in line to get that slot)
Lonely elderly people.
That’s what THEY depend upon.
If you don’t answer, you might miss your chance to be on Jeopardy! A lot of the contestants tell the same story about how they almost didn’t answer because they didn’t recognize the number.
My phone makes noise all the time. If I jumped every time it did, I’d never get anything done. If the phone is an unknown number, or “potential spam” it goes to voice mail. I always check, but rarely find messages when I look later.
Which is another thing. I actually have received actual messages of importance from “potential spam”, so listen up: if you’ve got a business, get real caller ID!
And another thing! Not only does the Jeopardy! second chance callers apparently not have caller ID, but at least one contestant said she sent her Sony call to voice mail, and never checked voice mail! WTF?
I will if I’m expecting a call from a Dr office or something else that isn’t in my phone.
Which is a legitimate reason not to answer it. Even “I hate talking to people” is a legitimate reason, it’s your phone/time after all, just that some of those people seem mystified that anyone else would not have the same hang-ups. (Heh… “hang-ups”)
I always let it go to voicemail if I don’t know it. If it’s important, they’ll leave a message and I can call them right back.
My dad and father-in-law both always answer it every time, and seem confused when it’s someone they don’t know (“Who is this? What…? Who…?”) Then my step-mom or mother-in-law are in the background yelling, “Just hang up! Why do you even answer if you don’t know the number?!”
This is why I always answer every call. It could be important.
My work phone number is in my cell phone’s contact list…but the personal cell phones of all my colleagues are not.
I recently hired a lawyer to sue somebody…of course her phone number is in my contacts. But there were three other lawyers working for her who handle my case, and I did not have their numbers.
Also, I have a big advantage over most of you folks… I live in a small, non-English speaking country, so spam calls are rare. 
I have a large collection of old phones. 1930s rotary dial, a pay phone, an Ericofon, lineman’s handset, all plugged in and working. I used to love talking on them. Then, the number of spammers exploded, and I needed caller ID boxes for each one. Then they learned how to spoof caller ID. Now they are totally useless. I get 10 calls a day, and NONE of them are valid.
And, as I’ve said here before, when I do decide to answer, just to see who keeps calling every ten minutes, no one is there! How can I fall for your spam scam, if you aren’t there talking to me?
And cellphone caller ID is mostly worthless. If they aren’t already in my contacts, I either get a number with no info, or “potential spam”.
“They” need to start over with a new caller ID, generated by the phone company and (as much as possible) unhackable. Same thing for email.
My phone is set up to send all calls from non-contacts straight to voicemail. My voicemail is set up to transcribe voice messages to text. I prefer text communication, so if I read a message I want to respond to I’ll initially attempt sending a text.
Knowing all of this, we usually use my gf’s cell number for deliveries, etc.
Same here. The ones that just give a city/state (often out of state to me) are a clear sign of a scammer; unknowns are right out for answering; phone numbers with no name are no-answers with one or two exceptions when I have reason to be expecting a call.
IDs I recognize get answered; questionables go to the answering machine and I can pick up mid-message if one’s being left that’s legit, or call back.
Oh, yes – answering machine? I still keep a landline, and rarely use my cellphone or give out that number, so as to cut way down on crap calls to it. Plus with the landline I have a handset handy on every floor, so don’t have to tote my cellphone around with me.
I’ve had the same cell phone number for nearly 20 years, even though I now live far from where my area code is located. I also don’t keep in regular touch with anyone who lives there anymore, so if I see a phone number with my area code, or even another area code from that state, pop up on my caller ID, I know there’s a 99 percent chance that it’s a scam.
If I have to call someone I don’t know for work, I find these days it actually helps to send a text first, as people are more likely to read those than listen to a voicemail.
Actually I usually do. I’m retired so I don’t get work calls anymore, and I don’t give out my phone number very often, so it’s not a major source of interruption.
I don’t get a lot of spam calls, but when I do it is sometimes a source of amusement to string them along and see how good a job they are doing at trying to impersonate my bank or whatever. They are getting better: the thick foreign accent doesn’t appear so much these days…