<p>If a call shows up on caller ID as “out of area” or an 800 number, I usually let the answering machine get it. If I hear it is a call I want to take, I can then pick up the phone.</p>
<p>We had an awful time with some church calling repeatedly & asking for my H by name. We asked for the caller’s name, his supervisor’s name & asked to speak to the supervisor. We also asked for their complete address so we could be sure the complaint against them for invasion of privacy and stalking could be properly served. Several of the calls were being made from out of state & also out of country. They were calling many times every week! After the 3rd time we asked them for the complete address for our complaint and to remove H from their calling list, they FINALLY stopped calling us, but it was months & months!</p>
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<p>Ah, that’s the rub for me…we’re required to answer our land line phone if it rings because that’s the main way our students would get in touch with us. <em>sigh</em></p>
<p>The most annoying is the automated real-estate offer calls on our on-call phone. We HAVE to answer that phone, because that’s how people reach the RA on call at any time, and we were getting these calls at 2 or 3 AM. We still get them sometimes.</p>
<p>I feel the same way as above posters regarding the telephone and doorbell being an invasion. I retain a land line only because I have a business. I don’t answer it after 5 or on weekends. I would get rid of it in a heartbeat if I could.</p>
<p>I don’t worry about it being my kids/parents with an emergency. They have my cell # and it’s always on and with me. My kids would never even think to call the home phone anyway. My machine answers and I pick up IF it’s someone with whom I wish to talk.</p>
<p>I do not think the “do not call” list is working nearly as well as it did in its early years. Companies don’t care and obviously the small fines, if caught, are worth it to them. I personally would like to strangle “Rachel from Cardholder Services”.</p>
<p>I think I’m going to try saying, “This phone is for personal calls only.”</p>
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I’m going to try that, too. The one call I will happily take is from the Publishers Clearing House announcing they’ve found a winner and it’s me!</p>
<p>HGFM-
Can you get the name of the real estate co sending automated calls at 3 am, go on their website and find the main # to get off the list? That, or find the name of some of the realtors and call THEM at 3 am :)</p>
<p>^What a good idea! Maybe that would get them to knock it off. :D</p>
<p>What I hate is when it’s political season (which seems to extend every year) and the robo-calls start. Because the lawmakers exempted themselves from the Do-Not-Call, you can’t stop them. They are so annoying that some losing pols set up calls so that they seem to come from the opposition! In hotly contested areas, you can be getting five or six a day! I try to vote for the guys who refuse to use them. I’d like all politicians to sign a no-robo pledge. </p>
<p>The reason unlisted numbers don’t stop telemarketers is that they are working off a list that gives the state code, the exchange (first 3 numbers), and then just a numerical list of suffixes. It’s not generated from any phone book or anything that says which are listed and which are unlisted. So sooner or later, every number will be dialed.</p>
<p>Agreed!! The political robocalls are awful!! THis year we had a SPLOST election (special option sales tax) and we got probably 3-4 calls a DAY, up to 10:30 at night. They wanted yo to posh a certain key to tell them how you planned to vote. Didnt matter if you hung up or voted-- the calls continues. So I’d vote differently each time they called (though usually I simply picked up the phone and hung it right back up to disconnect the call.)</p>
<p>I find myself using the landline less and less…or at least answering it less. I am not ready to give it up entirely , but because of a less than honest salesperson that solicited our business last year from Verizon , our personal landline got tangles up in our business listings and we do get annoying calls , not always telemarketers but sometimes our customers …I appreciate their business , but home is home and that’s the way I want to keep it</p>
<p>Not to entirely highjack the thread (because it does involve a form of telemarketing, the fraudulent kind), but my elderly and infirm father-in-law, living in FL, called me today to ask if he could use my email–he has no computer–to receive some information about a lottery prize he had supposedly won. I immediately told him that these were all scams, and he admitted he receives this sort of thing in the mail on a daily basis, but this was via a phone call and “seemed different”, so he wanted me to look at the email and check it out. Holy moley. There were two attachments to the email–a letter from “Megabucks Sweepstakes Co.”, purportedly in Jackson, Mississippi, explaining that my FIL had “won” $11.8 million (!), which he could claim by sending them a mere $559 for an FTC “stamp of approval”, and a copy of a check made out to him for that amount (drawn on Wachovia Bank, with the account number conveniently chopped off). A quick Google check revealed this outfit (or should I say this one guy) has been working this scam for years, using constantly changing cell phone numbers. My FIL is not a stupid or naive man, so the caller must have been darn convincing to have persuaded him to even accept the email. What a pile of pond scum, to prey on the elderly this way. Many CC’ers have elderly parents or grandparents–they should be warned about this sort of racket. In any event, I have forwarded to the scammer all the Nigerian scam emails that have been caught in my spam filter in the past week–and that’s quite a few.</p>
<p>MommaJ – Forward any info you have to your local FBI. They build cases with stuff like this and do, in time, bring down the scammers. </p>
<p>In future, don’t respond by email to a scammer…it only puts your info on their system.</p>
<p>Well, per my FIL’s request, the scammer already has my email–but since there’s no money to be made off me, I’m sure he’ll move on to greener pastures. I’ll send the correspondence on to the FBI, but it seems these guys are impossible to pin down, since they’ve been operating for years–with a disposable cell phone and Photoshop, anyone can anonymously run a scam from anywhere. I have to admit, I do have visions of sending a check to a PO box and lying in wait for it to be picked up, surrounded by Fibbies with guns drawn!</p>
<p>Apparently talking on the phone will soon be obsolete:
<a href=“http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/20/fashion/20Cultural.html[/url]”>http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/20/fashion/20Cultural.html</a></p>
<p>I don’t get many calls anymore from telemarketers because I just don’t answer my landline since we don’t have caller ID. Anyone who knows us calls us individually on our cell phones. The worse calls are from our local police athletic league or some similar organization, I’ve actually had a cop threaten me when I declined to contribute.</p>
<p>My parents are considering getting rid of our land line altogether…the only reason they still have it is because both of my parents work from home.</p>
<p>MommaJ, this is the kind of thing that terrifies me about my elderly parents. They just aren’t savvy enough to keep up with all the clever plots to get their money. I’ve put them on the do-not-call registry and put a strong filter on their email, but still.</p>
<p>Another thing about the WWII generation is that they have good manners, which do not allow them to just hang up on someone. My dad especially will listen as long as a telemarketer cares to talk, will answer all the questions exactly as they’re rigged to be answered (“Mr. Smith, wouldn’t you like to save 50%?” What’s he supposed to say – “No!”?), will freely give out personal information. Scares me to death.</p>
<p>For those of you who feel you must pick up the phone in case it’s one of your kids calling: You don’t have caller ID?</p>
<p>One of the recent (and somewhat effective) scams is calling people and posing as an injured relative far away that needs money for bail, medical treatment or something else urgent. The call the victim and try to get them to send/wire funds ASAP to help extricate the relative from the awful plight.</p>
<p>We went cellphone only last year…it’s been great. You can see who is calling and the only annoying calls we get are from Verizon, offering to update our service. Even then, they usually just leave an easily ignorable text.</p>
<p>I am getting a dock this weekend that you plug a house phone into and sync up with your cell phone. Then, whenever your cell phone rings the house phone rings. I don’t have a land line and I always keep my cell on silent, so I think this will help me tremendously. I don’t get very many calls as I hate talking on the phone but I am known to miss calls from my mother from time to time.</p>