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The first minute of every phone call is torture now

theatlantic.com

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Re: The first minute of every phone call is torture now

#351

Post by themadturk »

JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #224
VBprogrammer wrote: post #172

I expected this to be about the now common pattern of subjecting people to some shit version of Alexa for 10 minutes before you eventually crack and allow them to sit on hold for someone who might actually be able to solve their problem. Bonus shit biscuits if you allow them to get to some answer from Brenda (the brainless Alexa clone) where you basically say "great news, you can do this online". As if anyone with ha…

Yes I thought it was going to be about the true hell that is calling any company now. Phone menus for at least a minute and then connected to someone with long Covid and/or new hire that has no idea what they are doing or forgot how. Then transferred to another and another and another. Covid annihilated customer service.

I had such a good (in-person) customer service experience last Spring I have to mention it here. Wife and I upgraded our phones. We both subscribe to month-to-month cell services, so we always buy unlocked phones from Apple. The problem is, Apple no longer sells unlocked phones from a physical U.S. Apple store unless you are signed up with a major carrier. The Genius who helped us with our purchase recognized the problem and logged on to the online Apple store and helped us order our new phones from a different, still-close-by Apple store, for pickup the next day. Though we picked up at the store, the order was placed online (by the kind Genius) and we avoided the major cell carrier requirement.

Re: The first minute of every phone call is torture now

#352

Post by mathstuf »

powersnail wrote: post #305
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have my phone set to silence calls unless they are in my contacts list. [...] Honestly I think this should be the norm. There's no reason for a random stranger to need to call you I teach an after-school coding class. Some weeks ago, the parents of two children didn't arrive at pickup. After 20 minutes, I called the parents using the phone number listed in my company's system. The parents confirmed they were runn…

Presumably, had silenced call be the social default, the parents would have added your phone number into their contact list on the first day of school, sort of like how you have to add someone on a chat app to talk to them.

Android has the option to ring if the same number calls within 15 minutes. I find it handy at least (though my robocall level is really low compared to the tales told here).

Re: The first minute of every phone call is torture now

#353

Post by tristor »

robomartin wrote: post #339
tristor wrote: post #188

I have never had any of the issues described in this article and I've been using AirPods w/ an iPhone and a MacBook since AirPods came out. My issue with phone calls is 1. Robocalls 2. Robocalls 3. Robocalls 4. Robocalls 5. Robocalls I've been all over the world, and it is straight up fucked how bad this issue is in the US and it's not like this elsewhere. It's completely fixable, but American telcos make money off l…

> 1. Robocalls 2. Robocalls 3. Robocalls 4. Robocalls 5. Robocalls I have always thought that a simple --and likely very effective-- way to combat robocalls is to charge a nominal fee for all calls not in your address book. That fee could be $1 or more. It really doesn't matter how much other than having to be enough to be costly for those making unwelcome calls. The charge is levied both ways. If someone you don't k…

> Without diving deeper, this seems like a simple, clean and perhaps even elegant way to deal with the issue.

I like your idea in theory. In practice, many of the calls are originating from countries which would not comply with any regulatory framework requiring this, and are in many cases intentionally complicit in scamming. Additionally, it would require telcos to know every number in your address book, something I think is frankly none of their business.

Re: The first minute of every phone call is torture now

#354

Post by res0nat0r »

armchairhacker wrote: post #240
tristor wrote: post #188

I have never had any of the issues described in this article and I've been using AirPods w/ an iPhone and a MacBook since AirPods came out. My issue with phone calls is 1. Robocalls 2. Robocalls 3. Robocalls 4. Robocalls 5. Robocalls I've been all over the world, and it is straight up fucked how bad this issue is in the US and it's not like this elsewhere. It's completely fixable, but American telcos make money off l…

> It's gotten so bad I just don't answer my phone unless it's a call from someone I know I have my phone set to silence calls unless they are in my contacts list. I tell people this whenever I give out my phone number. Honestly I think this should be the norm. There's no reason for a random stranger to need to call you, if they want to reach out they can text or email, and I can't imagine many urgent situations where…

I get tons of spam calls and texts, but I really never see any of them anymore. I'm on Android and Googles distributed spam detection is really working great. I'll get a notice sometimes that I got a txt moved to spam but most of the time I never see these, and it seems to also block all robocalls too and they only go straight to voicemail.

I probably have 15 voicemails right now I never knew came through because they're junk and auto-blocked.

Re: The first minute of every phone call is torture now

#355

Post by Animats »

kibwen wrote: post #165
rchaud wrote: post #157

The article makes a great point early on: hearing voices over VOIP is markedly different than over analog phone lines. The robotic voice and the weird compression when your connection isn't good are common for me. Worst of all is the 0.5-1 second delay I still sometimes hear, on local calls no less! If the same call was being had over a phone line and we were in the same country, the audio fidelity would be excellent…

The key word there being analog phone lines. Cell phone lines, which account for 99.99999% of all phone communication these days, are IMO worse than VOIP for sound quality (though better at latency). It's weird that kids growing up in the post-landline era will never realize how clear and amazingly low-latency phone calls used to be. If two people were seated across a table talking on a landline, they'd hear the sign…

"The key word there being analog phone lines."

No, the key words are uncompressed and non-packetized. The best telephone voice quality ever was ISDN from handset to handset. Digital end to end, 64Kb/s without compression, and rigidly clocked at the bit level. No noise. No jitter. Switzerland had ISDN to the home for years. Also, in Europe, there was power over ISDN, so the phone didn't need AC power or batteries. A friend there was annoyed when they forced him to convert to inferior VoIP, which, even over fiber, is worse.

Re: The first minute of every phone call is torture now

#356

Post by IshKebab »

chrisseaton wrote: post #160
rchaud wrote: post #157

The article makes a great point early on: hearing voices over VOIP is markedly different than over analog phone lines. The robotic voice and the weird compression when your connection isn't good are common for me. Worst of all is the 0.5-1 second delay I still sometimes hear, on local calls no less! If the same call was being had over a phone line and we were in the same country, the audio fidelity would be excellent…

That's funny - my experience is digital is much clearer than an old analog line.

Yeah definitely. Well we haven't had analogue phone lines for decades but compared to landlines, mobile can be much better - especially now we have HD Voice which landlines (and call centres apparently) can't access. Maybe it's the extra echo cancellation that's the real problem.

Re: The first minute of every phone call is torture now

#357

Post by VLM »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #278
armchairhacker wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's gotten so bad I just don't answer my phone unless it's a call from someone I know I have my phone set to silence calls unless they are in my contacts list. I tell people this whenever I give out my phone number. Honestly I think this should be the norm. There's no reason for a random stranger to need to call you, if they want to reach out they can text or email, and I can't imagine many urgent situations where…

> I have my phone set to silence calls unless they are in my contacts list. [...] Honestly I think this should be the norm. There's no reason for a random stranger to need to call you I teach an after-school coding class. Some weeks ago, the parents of two children didn't arrive at pickup. After 20 minutes, I called the parents using the phone number listed in my company's system. The parents confirmed they were runn…

The authorities have no reason to be involved. It's 20 minutes, and children can take care of themselves.

At least 99.9% of my voicemails are a couple second long robocalls, but in the rare event of it being a genuine phone call, I get the google transcription of someone saying 'please call me back' on my watch and then I do so. Just because I'm willing to glance at notifications on my watch of incoming voicemails for an instant, doesn't mean I'm willing to talk to hundreds of robocallers per month. Its just too expensive.

Voice phone calls are dead, kid discussion would usually be handled via text or email. I don't really get phone calls about my kids. I believe the more corporate-type environments enjoy the written documentation provided by text/email as opposed to unrecorded undocumented phone call.

The era of always-on low-fi audio connections was very short. Just 30 years ago, parents certainly had no electronic tether and had a home phone number, maybe with an answering machine in later years. And now that technology is completely dead and unusable.

Re: The first minute of every phone call is torture now

#358

Post by r00fus »

larrik wrote: post #333
WorldMaker wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I thought this article was going to be about robocalls. I don't think I'm alone in realizing that for now most robocalls auto-disconnect if they don't hear anything on the line for somewhere between 15 seconds to a minute depending on the software's patience I suppose. This has taught me to never answer the phone for an unknown number and immediately say something, just to put it on speakerphone and let it pick…

You may be over-doing it. Most robo-calls wait for a second "hello?". So you can say it once, then wait a bit for a human to answer normally. Then if they don't, you just hang up, as the computer is waiting for that 2nd "hello?".

I even just answer with a grunt or in a foreign language (e.g. "hola"). People know I may be juggling a mobile handset, automated systems hang up.

Re: The first minute of every phone call is torture now

#359

Post by yamtaddle »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #156
2000UltraDeluxe wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s crazy that anyone can force a full-screen interrupt on my personal device with no context. It's a _phone_. Phone calls are it's primary function. If you don't want that, wouldn't a pad be a better option than a phone? Besides, how would you handle calls from landlines and such?

As a phone, all cell phones are terrible. In the wired-phone era companies used to advertise on call quality. Nobody does that any more because the quality of cell phone calls is so abysmal that text with (or without frankly) emojis is an order of magnitude better for communication. If they made pads the size of my phone that could still use cell network internet and that I could put a custom OS on I'd consider it.

People who never experienced a really good connection when no more than a little of the phone & switching network was digitized, surely have no idea what they're missing. I've never once heard a call since that era that was as good—VOIP, Zoom, cell network, modern POTS network, whatever.

Re: The first minute of every phone call is torture now

#360

Post by yamtaddle »

daviross wrote: post #213
dr_dshiv wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Receiver anxiety” should crawl off into the forest. It’s a youth-millennial thing that inhibits waaaay too much authentic social action. People are just too scared to be human. Just call me! I might pick up I might not. For that matter, if I don’t respond to your email in a day, treat it like a phone call and just try again. Don’t assume I’m ignoring you. It’s just e-mail.

> if I don’t respond to your email in a day, treat it like a phone call and just try again. Don’t assume I’m ignoring you. I mean... aren't you ignoring them? It's an email. Where'd the first one go that the second one is going to be any different?

I miss a very high percentage of legitimate email messages from people because I don't receive many of them (half a dozen per year?) and get like 20-30 spam and mistyped-address emails per day (that's after the spam filters), so I don't pay much attention to it unless I'm expecting something.

Humans I know contact me through whatsapp. Or if they're old (and hell, I'm almost 40, so I mean old) through text or phone. Strangers' only real hope is text. I'll probably miss anything else. And even that is getting so goddamn spammy now that it's not far from being like email: only useful if I'm already expecting a message. I receive stupid political ads for states I've never lived in a couple times a day.

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