Originally Posted by
Anniedeb
Fortunately I've never received/answered any such call. We have caller ID and NEVER answer when the number/caller is not recognized. Rarely does the caller leave a message. If they do, it's to tell me they can lower my credit card rates, or mortgage rates...neither of which we have!!
We also screen calls, and I was dismayed to discover last week that a call coming repeatedly from "Out of Area" was actually my doctor's office trying to reach me with some routine test results. Results were negative, but I might have been missing something more urgent. I have to talk to them about what shows up as their ID. I got to thinking that it might be a deliberate effort to protect people's privacy, since that is one big concern lately. If it says "Doctor So-and-so" then someone in the vicinity of the phone might discover you've been seeing a doctor, and particularly at work, that might cause concern. There's a lot of paranoia around these days, some of it justified.
We are on the do-not-call list, and so almost all the unknown callers we get are either scammers, non-profits, or politicians. I could do without any of those calls, and immediately hang up on any recording. The most despicable ones are the ones that are silent when you do pick up, or worse yet they ask for one of us and then hang up without a word when we say, "Can't come to the phone." When it's a solicitor, I just interrupt and tell them as kindly as I can, "Sorry, I won't waste your time. We do not respond to any kind of phone solicitation. Please take us off your list." I hang up without listening to an argument. I'm really doing them a favor because in many cases they are required to stay on the line until the other person hangs up. The calls are often monitored, so they don't dare disconnect themselves, even if you're one who just likes to have fun with them. I've known people who say things like, "Please hang on. I need to go answer the door," and just go off leaving the caller hanging for however long they feel like it.
I feel very sorry for people who try to earn a legitimate living in these most reviled jobs, but if everyone had enough sense to shut them out - never buy anything, never donate anything via phone calls that you didn't initiate, and most certainly never, ever give information to strangers - we might quit getting these nuisance calls. When I was young, back in the Dark Ages, we never had pests calling us unless we had the misfortune of actually knowing them.