I’ll answer it if I recognise it’s a local number - so likely to be a service or store that I’ve been having dealings with. Also if I’m expecting a call from the Drs, because they don’t leave voicemails for whatever reason and if you miss the slot they’ve designated to call you, you are doomed.
I have 2 cel phones. My official phone rings incessantly. The numbers I expect and my contacts have one ring tone assigned. I know immediately who it is calling. I tell medical persons who say “we’ll call you with results” or whatever to give me the number they would be calling from. They are not always accommodating. So I tell them to text me a number when needed and I’ll return the call. Sometimes is ends up being a case of phone tag. They can always call Ivys phone as well.
I don’t talk on a phone for various reasons. I have a speech impediment or am mute occasionally. My family know to text.
My other phone rings once a month. Maybe. I get texts like crazy. Again, known peoples numbers have certain tones. A click actually. Anything else is ignored.
ETA: my main doctors office has patient portal. It works very well, for me.
I always answer the phone for unknown or even suppressed numbers.
About 90% of calls I receive from numbers I don’t recognize, and even about half of the calls from suppressed numbers are legit.
I have talked to some acquaintances about why their number was suppressed, and they either made the setting in error, or suppressed their number out of a misplaced sense of privacy.
The calls from numbers I don’t recognize usually are something like the pizza deliveryman calling because they did not find the doorbell, or a doctor’s practice calling because an earlier slot has become available, a shop calling because my wife had asked the branch to get something from central logistics for trying out in the store, or with craftsmen a journeyman calling because I had left my phone number with the master.
As for letting calls go to voicemail, in a lot of cases the caller does not want the hassle of waiting to be called back (as in the case of the doctor’s practice above - they call the next patient then), and a lot of callers do not record a call because they expected to talk in person, and are daunted and tongue tied when they suddenly have to formulate a voicemail message that has all of the information.
I only get one or two spam calls per week (total between mobile and landline phone), and it’s no hassle dealing with them. Often I am clued in because after I answer the phone the other party does not answer immediately but only after 1 to 4 seconds (this is indicative of speculative dialing from call centers)
Actually now I think of it, I haven’t been getting as many spam calls lately.
Maybe I have gotten on to some circulated spammers list: don’t call this guy, he’s on to the game and will waste your time?
I’ll sometimes answer just to see whether it’s a wrong number, someone I’m doing business with, or spam.
The spam calls are always the most entertaining, particularly if you confuse them in the first five seconds.
Hello, this is John from XYZ How are you today?
I’m sorry. Who did you say you are, and from what company?
(Pause. Then “click”)
I think we should be careful about generalising on this topic, because research indicates that individuals who are active on internet activities, such as bulletin boards and Wikipedia, are correlated to introversion in real life:
This corresponds with more general findings that Internet communities tend to attract users who are introverted offline but more able to open up and feel empowered on the Web.[11][12]
The research is a bit dated, but one implication is that it suggests that we as a group may be more inclined not to answer phone calls we don’t recognise.
All I can say is whenever the Publishers Clearinghouse Prize Patrol hands out those big checks, it’s always in person. I suppose if I saw Ed McMahon’s name come up on the caller ID I might answer it, but that would depend on 1) if I sent in the four required applications and follow up confirmations into Publisher’s Clearinghouse, and 2) if I’d held any seances lately to summon Ed’s spirit.
I have these discussions with my mother where she goes on and on about how she never answers calls from numbers she doesn’t know, followed by a detailed description of a call she received from “Amazon” which claims she bought a new MacBook.
I will answer any call to my phone, no matter what caller ID says (if anything). I don’t see any risk associated with it. If it’s a scam call, I can hang up or, depending on my mood, be rude to the caller, or even pretend that I’m stupid and play along a little while.
I do, since I often get calls for legitimate purposes (doctor’s appointments, for instance) from people I don’t know.
My wife does, and I’m not entirely sure why. She’ll say, “Take this number off your list” and block the number.
Me, I likely have not remembered to turn my sound back on after whenever I last turned it off (intentionally or not). And that is IF the phone happens to be in the same room as me (a BIG if.)
My phone tells me that yesterday and today I got 3 missed calls. Silent mode is off. I did not hear it ring any of the 3 times. Which is fine with me.
A large part of the headhunting business is outsourced to India. I’ve gotten many a legitimate call from an unknown number, from “potential spam” & some from numbers that don’t fit the US 3-3-4 phone # pattern.
Note that ‘legitimate’ ≠ ‘wanted’. It’s a real person, trying to reach me about a real job; however I’m not interested in contract work, nor in working in your state, or even remote work in the Pacific time zone hours so I usually don’t answer them, & when I do, it’s almost always, “Send me an email” & hang up. It’s a low bar to get these type of jobs, typically only understanding English, not actually being able to speak it well. I work in IT, & work with lots of Indians & usually don’t have a problem understanding what they’re saying, but the headhunters? One typically needs a machete if not a chainsaw to cut thru their heavy accent. I bet to the non-native speaker who hires them they sound fine, but not to anyone for who English is their first language.
I have. Last year I had to answer all calls for about 10 because I needed to talk to the hospital about my surgery and pre-surgery and all of that and had no idea if their name would show up. Nope.
So, of course, they will call back, using a different phony number. In the meantime, you got at least one call from someone else who lives in your area code, asking who you are because “you” tried to spam them.
Except for recently when I invited some sales calls from local car dealers, my phone rings about twice a week. My answering scheme:
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I answer calls from contacts if not otherwise fully occupied. if I’m busy, it goes to voicemail.
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I ignore / cancel calls from “spam likely” or calls from the area code my phone is from where I haven’t lived in a decade. Handy that. Likewise area codes adjacent to that one.
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I answer calls from local-to-here area codes if I have expectation today of a call from a vendor, delivery driver, appointment reminder for tomorrow, etc.
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I ignore / cancel all calls that don’t match any of the first 3 rules. If a voicemail appears, I might listen to it today. I might listen to it next Tuesday.
If it’s actually emergency level important, they’ll try twice. If they don’t, it wasn’t.
And yes, this setup causes some calls to fall into rule #4 that might better have been handled under rule #3 if only I’d thought of why somebody from someplace unrecognized might have been calling me then. That’s an acceptable cost to pay IMO.
As to those car dealers, real quickly I figured out which phone numbers they were using and added them to my mental ignore list. Despite the fact they leave voicemails.
I’m extroverted and don’t pick up unknown numbers on my cellphone, unless I’m expecting patio furniture, am waiting for a fella coming in to fix a toilet, have an upcoming medical appointment, or similar.
The landline is unlisted and exists so that there are phones around the house in case of an emergency without a cellphone in hand. Two people have that number, and both will show on caller ID.
I do, if I’m near the phone. (Most such calls I get are on the landline. My cell phone gets hardly any; I’ll answer that if I notice it buzzing and don’t have my hands full. It’s almost always on vibrate-only.)
A call from an unknown number might be from a potential farm customer. Or it might be from somebody with a question about the farmers’ market which I manage – a potential customer, or a potential vendor. Or it might be a neighbor whose phone number and maybe even name I don’t know – I once got ‘Hi, I just moved in at X house, have you seen my dog?’ (I hadn’t, but I kept an eye out for a few days.). Or it might be the veterinary, or a doctor, calling from their private line instead of the office number – those sometimes show up as the number being deliberately concealed. Or it might be the organic certification inspector, if it’s a new one. Some of any of those people might leave voice mail; some won’t; but even if they do, we may have to play phone tag for a couple of days to connect, which can be avoided if I pick the phone up.
Sometimes it’s a spammer or an outright scammer. In which case I can hang up.
Doing it that way doesn’t seem to wind up getting me more than a handful of spam/scam calls in a week.
I answer unknown numbers unless I’m extremely busy, in which case I try to check ASAP if they left a voice mail.
Although I have now retired, until recently I was the executive director of a local cultural organization well known in the community. Nearly all unknown numbers on my cell phone are people who want to contact me in my professional capacity. (My cell phone number is included in my sig line and is given out by the office for people who want to reach me.)
Sure, I could wait on all calls and listen to voice mail later, but occasionally it is something very time sensitive (for example, the local paper is just about to go to press, and they want to confirm a detail in a story they are running about our organization.) It’s also just friendlier, and gives a warmer, yes-we-are-paying-attention feel if a live person answers the phone. I feel it is incumbent on me to give the best possible impression of my organization. Even now that I’m retired, a lot of people still have my number, plus I am on the board and have a significant directorial role in a volunteer capacity.
But that’s my cell. As to my land line, which no one knows? Nah, that I don’t worry about answering. On the other hand, it almost never rings anyway, with known or unknown callers.
I’m baffled as to why I get very few scam calls on either my land line or my cell. The only thing I can think of is that my numbers are not in very many data bases, since except for 4 years in the 1990s I lived outside the US from 1986 to 2018. (I’ve had the US cell phone number since around 2002, but until 5 years ago it was only in use a couple months of the year.)
Oh yeah, forgot about that one. Could come up with regards to the farm, or the farmers’ market, or the planning board; and has done so with at least a couple of those. The number may not be the news site’s, it may be the individual reporter’s.
Due to medical problems over the summer I get a lot of calls from insurance, medical types, and so forth. MOST of them do not appear in my contacts and often just show up as “private” on my phone, no further information, or as “unknown”. MOST of them, for some unfathomable reason, seem disinclined to leave a voice mail despite my making it very clear I want them to do so and I am the only one who answers this phone so consider it private.
So I sort of have to answer the phone. Unless, of course, I don’t mind missing a doctor’s appointment, getting test results, scheduling for surgery, information about using insurance benefits, and so forth.
I don’t get that many spam calls, actually. Most of those that I do get are from the Republican party in a small town called Jordan in Utah. Apparently somebody going by the name Troy Salisbury gave them my number claiming it was his own. I have no idea how that happened - I don’t know anybody by that name and I’ve never been to Utah. Once in awhile I get a human on the other end of one of those and can tell them to take my number off their lists, which has reduced the number of annoying calls from them considerably.