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.