Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I hate telephones

jameshfisher.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 449 posts

Re: I hate telephones

#231

Post by paulie_a »

drewmol wrote: post #172
paulie_a wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you ever move. Make sure to go to the Post office and fill out the change of address there. If you do it online you are required to grant the USPS permission to sell your phone number. I recently moved and immediately found the number of spam calls increase drastically. From 1-2 a week to ten a day.

Just curious where you got this information? I did it online a few years ago and iirc I was able to opt out of all the spammy 'covienience' services offered by USPS affiliates

From the USPS directly. I recently attempted to do it online and that was not an option available. I emailed them regarding that and was told I should fill out a card at the post office.

Re: I hate telephones

#232

Post by DanBC »

jimbokun wrote: post #77
strathmeyer wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, things that cause you stress can be neurosis and psychoses. If it ruins your focus it is affecting your life and can be classified as a disorder.

How can a phone ringing not ruin your focus? Maybe you never actually focus on anything, and so do not understand the phenomenon?

this is not ruined focus:

> Recently, when I was at mum’s alone, the house phone rang. I didn’t answer it. It rang again immediately. I didn’t answer it. It rang again immediately. I stood over it, willing it to stop, palms sweating.

Re: I hate telephones

#233

Post by camhenlin »

figurehe4d wrote: post #173
izacus wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

20 spam calls per day? That sounds like torture... is there really no body in USA that would prevent that from happening? (I've never received a spam call on my now 20 year old phone number.)

Unfortunately it doesn't work that way, the ones that DO give you the option to be 'do not call' will forward your number to other spammers, actually increasing the spam calls you get. Do not ask them to put you on the d-n-c list! Here's what does work (in my experience): answer the call, but say nothing, heck, mute your phone mic if you have to. Just give them silence. I'm not sure if there's some 'person on the oth…

I like to answer the phone, say “please hold” then put my headphones up to the phone. This is great because it triggers whatever automated system they have to get active callers on the line, and wastes the time of a real human, who might realize what’s going on and prevent the system from calling my number again to begin with.

Re: I hate telephones

#234

Post by jey »

kemayo wrote: post #61
kibwen wrote: post #37

I receive about 20 spam calls per day. In contrast, I receive about 0.2 legitimate calls per day. Google itself suspects that these are spam calls, because it pops up a bright red "SUSPECTED SPAM CALLER" warning when the phone begins ringing. And yet, I have found no option to have the phone automatically decline the call. There's not even an option to silence the ringer for any call not from my contacts; I actually…

Strangely enough, given Android's comparatively-customizable nature, I think this is an area where iOS does it better? (Others might correct me.) iOS 10 added "call blocking" as an app-type, which lets you choose apps which can filter phone calls for you. They can flag calls as possible-spam, or completely block them. (See [1] for Hiya's options screen, as an example.) An "only ring for my friends" feature is sort of…

> I don't think it's possible to make a call-blocker app which functions as a whitelist, sadly, because I think this is like their browser content blockers and operates as the app providing a list of blocked numbers for privacy reasons.

Oh, that must be why the AT&T Call Protect app fails to block spammers the first time they call me. Always wondered about that.

Re: I hate telephones

#235

Post by ChuckMcM »

dqv wrote: post #222
ChuckMcM wrote: post #48

There are a number of phone answering services that will ameliorate this issue. These guys charge $1/call ( http://www.answeramerica.com/telephone-answering-service-pri... ) (no relation to them). In terms of startup ideas, there is probably an Uber like service opportunity here. An app where your "operators" can download and put on their phone, and when ever they want to they can put them selves "active" at which po…

It sounds like a good idea in theory, and excuse my being unimiginitive, but answering services are even more blue collar than ride hailing. It's a lot of work that I'm not sure many people want (the operators and everyone else involved with running the service). Anyway, the big problem with this concept is the profitability of answering services is predicated on constantly changing the rates and dropping "dead weigh…

I don't think you're being unimaginative, you're asking good questions.

There are a two things which are orthogonal here, one is capturing what might be called 'fractional GDP' from available workers. Basically that is ways in which people are creating an easy way for an individual worker to work or not work based by creating a disintermediated interface between the service users and the service providers. The 'App' economy, the 'Gig' economy, what ever you call it, it tries to create a lightly held employment relationship between service provider and client in the form of an application and a payment provider.

The second thing is whether or not there is enough value in a telephone answering service that it can be successfully monetized. That is an operational efficiency question which would depend on some research into the hows and whats of implementing such a service. Customers for such a service go from the rich and famous who might go so far as to hire a staff member to screen their calls, to someone who has never considered it. Using existing infrastructure and full time staff clearly hits a minimum cost point, and then folks like the author of the essay don't get enough value to hire the service at the rates they need to charge.

Bottom line is if the service can be restructured in such a way to be additionally more efficient such that you can capture the low end of the market and perhaps serve the upper end at a better rate. If you can that is a business.

Re: I hate telephones

#236

Post by DanBC »

Tharkun wrote: post #96
monk_e_boy wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He spent the best part of a day compiling a spreadsheet of possible answers to a conversation, the wrote a lengthy blog post telling us about it. That is not normal.

Pray tell, why isn't that normal? And why are you qualified to decide what is, or isn't, normal?

> Recently, when I was at mum’s alone, the house phone rang. I didn’t answer it. It rang again immediately. I didn’t answer it. It rang again immediately. I stood over it, willing it to stop, palms sweating.

Sweating palms is a fear response. It's adrenaline and fight / flight. It's pathological, it interferes with his day to day life, and he deserves safe effective evidence based treatment.

Re: I hate telephones

#237

Post by jasonkostempski »

kibwen wrote: post #37

I receive about 20 spam calls per day. In contrast, I receive about 0.2 legitimate calls per day. Google itself suspects that these are spam calls, because it pops up a bright red "SUSPECTED SPAM CALLER" warning when the phone begins ringing. And yet, I have found no option to have the phone automatically decline the call. There's not even an option to silence the ringer for any call not from my contacts; I actually…

Instead of ignoring those I usually answer and hang up to avoid the missed call notifications, clearing it, getting a VM notification a few second later, clearing that, then deleting it. Lately the callers have been calling right back too. It's really a lot of work. The worst thing is, I've had one false positive spam detection, it was from my bank and it was important, now I'm a little nervous to do the answer/hangup thing.

Re: I hate telephones

#238

Post by tgb »

gonehome wrote: post #135
maxerickson wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The internet myth is that it doesn't work but all you have to do is answer and ask them to put you on their do not call list. Not give them a big tiresome speech about how they are breaking the law, just ask them not to call anymore ("Please put this number on your courtesy do not call list"). They actually don't want to waste their time...

This depends on the caller. A lot of the calls I used to get were the ones where they spoof a phone number that has the same first few digits as yours to make it seem like a local number and then the caller is a scammer “You owe money to the IRS”, “Your computer has a virus and you have to pay to fix it”. Engaging these callers is probably not useful.

Which makes them easy to spot if you get a number from a far away area. The only calls I get from my phone's area code are misdials or spam, but my doctor's office stands out without a whitelist.

Re: I hate telephones

#239

Post by mmagin »

xnxn wrote: post #19

Preach it. Also, has call quality completely tanked in the last decade or is it just me?

Yes, it's all shitty low bandwidth mobile phone voice codecs or VOIP stuff. Good old digital trunk lines (8 bit 8 ksample/sec mu-law -- the same as the .au file encoding, I think) sounded really quite good.

Re: I hate telephones

#240

Post by dylz »

mikestew wrote: post #35
Trav5 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not OP, but same here. Born in the 80s and only our parents have landlines. Though my mobile and office phone receive far more spam calls than real calls. My Google voice line gets a hand full of robot voicemails per day. The "Should I answer?" app blocks a lot, but not all.

Born in the 60s, old enough to be your parent: no landline at our house in I don’t know how many years. We both have a phone that’s nearby all of the time, what would we do with a landline except as a spam vector? And my parents, who are old enough to be your grandparents? Ditched the landline a couple of years ago. I have no idea what the demographics look like for hardlines anymore.

I'd qualify as a Gen Z or something.

I despise phone calls. They are blocking, synchronous, distracting, painful (having to hold a phone up in the cases I'm not at a desktop with a softphone and headset), I hate repeating myself whenever I need to read a password or username or email or anything (I have a non-.com email too, so many call centre people have literally zero idea what to make of this). Any time I have to make a call it's a multi-hour ordeal, repeating myself numerous times, on hold for half an hour or more. With phone: I don't know who you are, I don't know your number, I'm not going to verify anything until I can positively identify the caller first.

I've not had a landline before. My first ever phone in primary school was an Android. Where I am, it's not even possible to get an ancient legacy physical landline service - all available providers are transparently be VoIP (like Comcast).

My only experience with phone calls has been automated spammers and PagerDuty during an oncall outage. For personal, if it's important, email me, I reply in under 60 seconds from anywhere. I get push notifications. Not a single one (I cannot even think of _one_) of my friends like phone calls: I don't remember their numbers, they don't remember my numbers, we just message each other on Discord or Messenger or Hipchat or [...]. Most of them get actually quite pissed off if there's a standard voice call that isn't a life threatening emergency. Worst-case is iMessage/SMS.

For work purposes, if something is down, message me on Slack or something. I see your username and team, I can find what's wrong while replying. If you call me, it's a waste of time during a high priority outage if that.

Post reply on HN