Maybe you're a bill collector.

[conuly]

Maybe you're a telemarketer. Maybe you're calling from a doctor's office, and god I hope not, because if your response to "I'm sorry, who is this?" is to give your own first and last name and not the name of your employer and the reason you are calling, then as far as I'm concerned you are a wrong number.

Comments

[readerjane]

Hear, hear!

I have my phone set so that if the incoming call isn't from a number on my contacts list, it goes directly to voicemail.

I'll have to turn that feature off week after next, because I'm participating in a disaster-recovery exercise for work where IT will call me any time during the week and tell me they're ready for me to test the recovered backup of my database. No way to know when or what number the call will come from.

Not lookin forward to a week of spam calls, no sirree.

[conuly]

I'm the only one of us who will answer calls from unknown numbers. Consequently, everybody gives my number to everybody. Doctor's offices? Schools? Perfectly legit folks who will call us later? I'm the contact person!

Which is actually okay with me except when I get folks like that one. "Jane Smith" is not an adequate answer to my question and they certainly do know that.

[melita66]

I'm also the contact person and our previous school and district kept using different numbers even as I kept adding them as contacts. I usually ask, "What's this about?"

[alexseanchai]

huh. because my former place of employment, anyone could dial any of our numbers from anywhere, and we could dial anyone else in…possibly the entire state government phone system? definitely our division…and caller ID would show which specific number was placing the call, but if we called anyone outside our phone system, it would show as a call from the same number as on the division's website as the main contact-by-phone.

[alexseanchai]

I set my ringtone to None without vibrate, same as most of my phone notification sounds, and my voicemail message to something like "Hi, you have reached the voicemail box of Alex [Seanchai]. If it is important to you that I get your message, you need to text or email me, instead of leaving a voicemail. Thank you for your commitment to disability accessibility."

my text app actually does make noise, and if I actually want them to contact me then I have already given them my email with instructions to use that instead of my phone number. (unless they're the pharmacy, but if the pharmacy calls me it's probably bc I got bored of sitting in a chair by the pharmacy and am wandering the rest of the Fred Meyer, and I am probably checking my phone every thirty seconds for if there's a missed call from that contact.)

weirdly enough I don't get nearly as many texts as I get calls from unknown numbers.

[greghousesgf]

I get people calling who don't even bother to identify themselves when I answer the phone. They get hung up on real fast.

[captainsblog]

This is the one area in which I have some sympathy for bill collectors. Because I are one. But almost exclusively commercial (businesses suing businesses, where the rules I am about to quote do not apply):

The applicable federal statute is a quagmire, particularly if you touch a telephone in the process of debt collection. If you speak to the consumer, you are REQUIRED to disclose your identity as a debt collector and give other mandatory warnings. If the phone is answered by anyone other than the consumer, you are PROHIBITED from identifying yourself as a debt collector. Multiple calls without speaking or leaving a message, either way, are also problematic. My solution, on the rare consumer collections I handle? I don't call. Voicemails and calls to mobiles have bodies of case law that boggle my brain.

[conuly]

If you speak to the consumer, you are REQUIRED to disclose your identity as a debt collector and give other mandatory warnings. If the phone is answered by anyone other than the consumer, you are PROHIBITED from identifying yourself as a debt collector.if this caller was collections, then I guess they had their hands tied.

[thewayne]

I have a collector calling me who is flat-out lying. They claim to be calling about a legal matter involving a local animal hospital where we have taken one of our previous dogs, but we're in New Mexico and they're calling from New York. I called the vet and they say no, our account is clean. So these collectors bought some debt that I cleared through bankruptcy and they haven't sent me any letters: they've been calling me for two years now, leave the same one minute message.

They're blocked, so it goes straight to VM without ringing. I just have to delete the VMs occasionally as they fill up my phone's memory.

[raino]

I slightly envy people who can just not answer unknown numbers. I need to answer all of them, because sometimes it's someone asking if I can come give lecture even though most of it is telemarketing. And then I sometimes answer in an irritated tone to people who are just about to say "we'd like to pay you half of your monthly loan payment for speaking in our 2 hours event" >_

[chez_jae]

What I hate is when someone calls me and then asks who I am. My response to that is always: "Whom did you call?!"

[conuly]

Today I got a call that started off with the company, great great great, but when I asked "Who are you calling for" they hung up - without even saying goodbye, which is a great way to get on my good side.