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Don't Pick Up: Missed calls in India

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Re: Don't Pick Up: Missed calls in India

#31

Post by simlevesque »

NoPicklez wrote: post #22
sen wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah this was big among my age group in Australia too, in the late 80s early 90s. Pay phones only charged if the other end picked up, so it was an easy way to tell dad to pick you up or that you’d be late.

When I was young I used to use the 1800-REVERSE number, which would require the person answering the phone to pay. I thought it was a great way to contact my parents if I had run out of phone credit.

In Canada, it asked for your name and the person would hear it before accepting the fees.

The trick was to say that your name is "come pick me up mom" or something like that.

Re: Don't Pick Up: Missed calls in India

#33

Post by kstenerud »

I wrote a "ring knocking" tool back in my college days so that I could connect to my Linux box at home from the labs at school since I was on dial-up. I'd go to the payphone, put in a quarter, call my line and let it ring the requisite number of times, hang up, get my quarter back, then go to the lab and check my school email account. The ringconnectd daemon would detect the rings, wait a few seconds, connect to my ISP, and mail me its current IP address.

It was my second open source project: https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/system/network/daemons/rin...

I was still getting support requests for it in the late 2000s from people who were using it in South Africa :)

Re: Don't Pick Up: Missed calls in India

#34

Post by khuey »

simlevesque wrote: post #31
NoPicklez wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was young I used to use the 1800-REVERSE number, which would require the person answering the phone to pay. I thought it was a great way to contact my parents if I had run out of phone credit.

In Canada, it asked for your name and the person would hear it before accepting the fees. The trick was to say that your name is "come pick me up mom" or something like that.

Geico did a commercial based on this once. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JxhTnWrKYs

Re: Don't Pick Up: Missed calls in India

#35

Post by rsanheim »

Missed calls still signal a lot in this day and age.

One example: you send a couple serious texts to a close friend or partner after an argument. They stay unread and you get no response. You then call and see if they pick up after a few rings. If not you hang up and wait or maybe write it off. If the other person is there (and often you know they are there monitoring their phone) maybe now they respond (via txt or call) because they see it as important. If they don’t that says something about where things stand.

Another: you call someone first and get no answer. You then send some texts explaining why you want to chat and the urgency or context. From there you can gauge if the other person cares enough to respond quickly or ignore.

Obviously this all assumes an always online context for both parties, which can cause its own issues when that may not be the case.

Missed calls still hold a lot of important signal in an age of “I only txt” always connected people.

Re: Don't Pick Up: Missed calls in India

#36

Post by tartoran »

Haemm0r wrote: post #18

In Austria the former provider "one" had a prepaid plan, where you where not billed for listening to your mailbox and talking to the mailbox of others using the same provider. You can imagine that they did not earn much among teenagers.

In Eastern Europe when cellphones became widely popular I remember a plan in which the first 3 seconds were not added to the bill and we as teenagers were making the best use of those seconds. Text messages weren't really a thing back then.

Re: Don't Pick Up: Missed calls in India

#37

Post by zuppy »

vzaliva wrote: post #7

I recall in Ukraine in nienties some mobile operators did not charge for the first few seconds of a call (I think it was 2 or 3). There was an art of communication around that...

Same in Romania. I think it was somewhere around 1997, they changed that once people started having multiple 2-3 seconds calls.

I still wonder what was the reason for that free window, was it a technical limitation?

Re: Don't Pick Up: Missed calls in India

#38

Post by galuggus »

u678u wrote: post #17

UK Pirate radio had this too. If you liked a song you could upvote by calling a number, they could count how popular a song was by the number of missed calls.

YI wonder if that's where Drake (or one of his ghostwriter s) took the phrase 'hotline bling' from. Before his song I only ever heard that on late 90s pirate radio in London (to describe the Nokia screen lighting up with missed calls)
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