People should send calling cards ("Hi, it's so-and-so, wish to call on you at your convenience") and wait for a response. Same for telephones (send an email/text message first).
Same here. Anyone at my door who I don't expect is either proselytizing for their religion (looking at you Mormons and JWs), begging for money, or trying to sell me something.
So how are you supposed to intelligently take in an article like this if you can't speculate on the causes of the trauma he reports? "Diagnosing" someone is by definition done by an expert. Having a suspicion as to the cause of something (even if that cause might be a mental disorder), is something regular people do, in order to make good decisions.
I agree with you. This is not a normal response (unless he's joking):
>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. The stand-off was only broken when mother texted me to tell me to answer the phone. I hate telephones.
Also the desire to regard himself as an otherwise confident person (even superior to the majority!) seems to be very strong:
> In many polls, people list their number one fear as “public speaking”, beating out “death” by some margin. Not me.
Perhaps for this reason the fear of talking to a stranger must be so strongly suppressed.
Personally, I also often feel uncomfortable when accepting a call from an unknown number, but I try to lean into the pain and pick up nevertheless. I actually think of my phone as something like a therapeutic device that allows me to practice talking to strangers and little by little the feeling of uncomfortableness will fade away...
I have an anxiety disorder (GAD), so here's some personal anecdote...
My fear of phone is more among the line of "I might miss something _very_ important if I don't answer immediately." Unsolicited phone calls, and sometimes non-important phone calls make me very annoyed/angry to the point that sometimes I started yelling at caller over the phone. I know I shouldn't.
However, at the same time, I'm also scared of answering the phone from known or unknown callers since I _don't know_ what they're calling me for. Even such call is expected, I always assume they're to tell me a bad news. I'm fully aware it's absurd, but it's uncontrollable.
I hate phones and I'm an extrovert. I've cold-called people, asking for money, aka fund raising. So I know too well why strangers are calling me. If I recognize the soliciting campaign, I'll text back "How much?" But I only pick up the phone if someone's in my contacts. If I'm in the mood.
Please don't do internet psychiatric diagnosis on HN. Like accusations of astroturfing and shillage, it does far more harm than good, even accounting for the few cases where it might be right.
Me too. No land line, no mobile. I don't have an anxiety response as detailed here so much as a properly calibrated respect for my own uninterrupted time. Job wants me to get a mobile phone but we'll see. Email makes sense: it's a pull interface. If you want a push interface to communicate with me you'll have to ring my door bell
I recently made the mistake of helping carry the load at work by answering the phone there. It's alright, mostly scripted, & my lack of customer friendliness (Surprising the amount of silence yes/no answers invoke) will hopefully transition us away from having a developer handling support calls soon
They're aware. I said I hate phones in my interview. We're a small company that recently had a third of the company leave. We're getting me to focus on streamlining triage for support emails, where my ability to dig into SQL & RTFS can be done without a client on the line
Wow presumptious much? I didn't call the customers annoying-- though I'll admit sometimes you get that person. Most of the time people are happy to be interacting with someone who at leasts knows what they're doing & can solve their problem. Woe is me for being problem oriented rather than customer oriented
You do realize those annoying customers wouldn't have anything to call about if it without those introverted developers who are busy programming whatever's been management's whim since last sprint?
And they wouldn't have a job if nobody did the accounting, and they wouldn't have a job if nobody did the building maintenance, and they wouldn't have a job if nobody designed marketing material...
A lot of jobs are important. That doesn't imply that everyone should want to do every job.
Customer support is just one job among many. And disliking customer support isn't disliking customers.
I wonder if this might be a general trend as the bulk of communication has pretty much already moved to text. If not outright phobia, at least dislike of the medium of 'speaking' would seem to be likely.
More companies might need to accelerate towards offering text/chat options for their customer service if they don't already. It may not directly put a customer off, but it might be another signal in a list of comparisons that pushes the scales in favour of a competitor.
I'm about to ditch my landline and one of the main reasons (in addition to not using it much) is that legitimate calls are far outnumbered by junk calls. I don't answer numbers I don't recognize but it's still a distraction.
There seems to be some principle in play where the misuse of a communications channel rises to the point where it's annoying but not quite unusable. If I got 20 junk calls a day, I'd have to turn my phone off. As it is, it's at nuisance level but still usable.
Out of curiousity, when were you born? I was born in the 80's, and among my friends literally noone has a landline, not even the older ones. There's simply no argument for it. I'm in northern Europe by the way.
- Until we switched wholesale to a videoconferencing provider, I pretty much needed a landline for work purposes. In addition to just routine conference calls, our webcast provider wanted us on landlines when we gave webinars and I had little desire to go into the office at 11pm at night for the Asia Pacific webcast slot.
- I get poor cellphone reception at my house. Not really an issue now with WiFi assist but I pretty much needed a landline (actually Comcast triple-play) before that.
- I preferred having phones throughout the house and having an emergency backup.
- I like/liked the ability to give out a legitimate phone number that is not my cell.
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.
True, not that it matters, but my parents and my in laws have a decade or two on you... One lives in an area with poor cell service (surrounded by good service). My Dad doesn't carry, and when he does it's a feature phone that is off. Ha.
Of the residents I know for sure do or don't have a land line, they are the only ones.
Yeah, there is the assumption of “for those with coverage”. We couldn’t cut the line until we switched to T-Mobile, because AT&T could not get coverage to our house smack in the middle of Redmond, WA.
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.
There IS an argument for it. Around a year ago we had a freak windstorm here. It was an amazing experience - took down trees and tore apart roofs all over. I'd never seen houses crushed by trees before. The power was out for days in some places, including mine. My phone battery died after a day, ditto the laptop's battery. My landline continued to function throughout.
As I recall the service was also extremely inexpensive as part of a DSL bundle. It is true that the landline was a powerful spam magnet, much more so than my cell.
You also have E911 with a landline that you don't get with the same accuracy/resolution with cellular service.
AFAIK, it's not super-cheap with Comcast especially as it uses a different modem than my Internet service.
One of the reasons that landlines are more of a spam magnet is that a lot of call types are exempted from the do not call list on landlines but not cell phones. There may be other reasons as well.
Natural disasters that cut off power for more than a few hours are unlikely in Northern Europe. Cell towers have their own emergency power supply to deal with the once in a decade brown out.
If the power is off for days it means the Apocalypse or WW3 has happened.
Northern Europe refers geographically to the northern part of Europe, or in a narrower sense, to the cultural grouping of the Nordic countries, Baltic countries, and sometimes also the British Isles. (Wikipedia)
Thank you, however I wasn't looking for the Wikipedia definition. I could have easily looked that up myself. I wanted to know what the poster personally meant by the term.
It’s not that uncommon here in Canada. It’s not like it happens every winter, but it is not uncommon to have some huge snow storm or frost that leaves some people without power for days.
Just this last winter thousands in New Brunswick were left with no power in the dead of winter for over a week.
>The power was out for days in some places, including mine. My phone battery died after a day, ditto the laptop's battery. My landline continued to function throughout.
In your case PSTN was the "stable fallback" but there is nothing inherent in the technology that makes this so. Your phone stations still need power, and if they don't have backup power they'll be dead as well.
Cables have a bigger chance of breaking if they're in the air, less so if they're buried. Of course, PSTN, power and fiber can all be both in the air or buried. There's nothing inherent in any of them that make them more "resilient". So if you live in an area where your PSTN is buried and your power lines aren't, it might to lead you to conclude that PSTN is "stable", in fact there's nothing about PSTN in itself that makes it so.
In a lot of places, cell towers will have backup power as well, and so will fiber networks, and your power network might be (should be, probably) buried and better protected than your other cables.
Unsolicited or unexpected phone calls are annoying, but this guy has an anxiety disorder and should probably attend CBT or psychotherapy as it is obviously significantly impacting his life in a negative way.
Also, text is not always a the best way of communicating- a lot of information is conveyed in someone’s voice which is often difficult to put on paper. It can also be way faster to speak to someone, particularly where a problem is a little complex and requires information to be exchanged between both parties multiple times.
The lack of information in voice is sometimes a boon. If I am annoyed, I can nevertheless always write perfectly politely, but I cannot always keep the annoyance out of my voice.
I agree. I loathe telephones, I also dislike speaking in public, and to people. None the less, I find the inflection, tone, rate of speech all add to meaningful communication. I hate my own voice, so I dislike speaking, but if I find comfort with whom I am speaking, I find it pleasurable, and perhaps more informative than else. It is the human level of it.
Most of the time I'm with you, but it works both ways.
I accidentally started a fight on HN by typing the exact opposite of my views, or at least something that could apparently be interpreted that way. I don't think I would have been misunderstood in the same manner in speech.
In speech your voice determines your tone. In text your reader determines your tone.
Have you considered not diagnosing mental illnesses in HN comments? Let alone offering "treatment advice" on a case you know nothing about, without having spoken to the person in question?
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.
Sure it's normal for people to make an assessment on other people. Some of those people fall outside the bell curve.
The middle of the bell curve for a particular trait (e.g. talking on the telephone) is normal - so about 90% of the population.
You want to redefine the word normal. OK, sure. What should I use? Different? Strange? Unique? Flower? Snowflake? I don't know. Sounds pretty odd behaviour to me. Not wrong, not bad, not dirty. Just weird. Odd. Not normal.
Have you done/read any studies on people's telephone behaviour? No? Then how can you speculate about what does and doesn't fall within 2 standard deviations of the mean?
> 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.
Yes this isn’t the place for diagnoses, merely speculation and advice. That said, I am certain that if he repeated his post verbatim or in summary to his GP they would refer him to a therapy service.
Its ironic that his anxiety prevents him from getting diagnosed / treated for it. Probably quite common in mental health.
Internet psychiatric diagnosis is not ok in HN comments. As a trope it is perhaps second only to you're-the-shill-no-you're-the-shill in the degradation it causes to discussion. And consider that the author posted this, so you're talking about someone in the room.
I'm sure you didn't mean it that way, but it's still something we all need to have the discipline and good taste to avoid. If we have to we'll add it to https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, but I'd rather avoid having a laundry list of verbotens.
It seems a shame that someone with a very treatable mental health problem should continue to suffer a limited life just because we're all too polite to say "have you thought about CBT?"
I do wonder what you'd say if someone described a physical health problem and people suggested they go see a physical health doctor.
You're making a series of assumptions here: that the problem can be accurately assessed this way, that the commenter is qualified to do so, that a message board comment is a suitable medium for such a message, and that the noise of this being an internet argument trope wouldn't drown out the signal of human concern. That's a lot of slack to cut "this guy has an anxiety disorder".
Sure. Because so many people are using cell phones these days. As a result, you have a lot of poor reception/dropped calls/etc. that would have been unheard of in the days of the Bell system much less newer fiber optic networks. In many things (see also music listening to a large degree) we've regressed considerably in quality to buy convenience.
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.
ulaw isn't all that good, but EVRC running at full rate, nevermind how Sprint and Verizon ran it at much less than that just butchers voice calls.
Opus will hopefully end the mish-mash of codecs that currently permeate telephony, as it is much higher quality at lower bitrates, and unlike GSM, ulaw, and even G722 (which some call HD Voice) it can handle packet loss gracefully. Makes all commonly used codecs look terrible in comparison.
I love telephones, they're useful for having efficient and comfortable synchronous conversations. I don't think the level of hatred expressed here is warranted. Yeah, it's annoying when occasionally you receive a phone call at an unwanted hour, but sometimes it's crucial for people to get in contact with you.
I have a publicly listed number (in addition to a private one), and I have not received a spam call this year even once. When people call my phone, it is warranted.
Telephones remain the best way to contact emergency services, or settle things which you have no option to settle in person.
Not the above poster but: it is _so_ much faster to figure out what somebody is doing wrong like this.
My first preference is a screenshare or video conference, so I can see what they see. Second is a phone call. Third is live chat like IRC or Slack and emails are a distant last place.
The same reason why sometimes meetings are actually important and faster to come to a decisions than email or chat. When you have all the stakeholders in front of each other, either physically or virtually, information is disseminated and decisions come together much quicker.
I don't hear, so I don't phone. However some business is almost impossible to conduct without phoning. AWS requires identification by phone. Customs tried to call me to ask me something about my bike I sent home from a holiday abroad. Credit cards are only unblocked by a phone call. And so on. (And phone relays are only a partial solution because some commpanies deem them insecure - I have currently a credit card I was not able to unblock, I will send them a cancellation notice.)
So, in other words, it's not hatred or perhaps an anxiety disorder, but a real discrimination of a disability, which leads me to agree with Mr Fisher.
Interesting. You don't use TTY devices then? I wouldn't be entirely surprised if those became less prevalent as telephone services decline in popularity, but I'd figured most of the deaf community used them still.
I don't understand this question. You mean, are AWS, the credit card institution and the customs also using TTY devices? Sorry, no.
And since texting (mobile short message service) TTY slowly went out of use, at least here in Switzerland. I still own a TTY device, however I haven't used it for more than ten years.
An interesting technical tidbit here: My TTY is using V.21, however with only one channel and with 110 baud. I researched the TTY with recording on a sound card and analysing the tones. Bit 0 is represented by a sinus wave of 1180Hz, 1 by 980Hz with a duration of 9.1ms each. A byte was transferred with 10 bits (total duration 91ms), 1 bit was a stop bit and the other one a parity bit (I am not sure, I forgot some details). Additionally there was a carrier tone at 1080Hz which was held for about 3 seconds after the last byte has been sent.
This means it was not possible that both parties simultaneously send. We had a convention that the other party is allowed to answer when we type two asterisks.
A phone relay service in Switzerland still continues to use this convention in their JavaScript application. It is a simulation of the old TTY device they sold to people. I think they had to use websockets because every letter is sent to the other party right away.
I'm not sure why this has been downvoted. James wrote this:
> 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.
That meets the UK legal definition of a disability, and under UK law he can ask for reasonable adjustments to avoid telephones. He could give his mental health status as the reason he needs the reasonable adjustment, but most places won't know much about that, and so it would be easier if he used hearing impairment - many places know about hearing impairment, and have processes in place to avoid telephone use.
Maybe I should have said I'm speaking from personal experience: I've got a bank and some bits of government departments and some bits of the NHS to use email rather than telephone with me.
"Last year, I received a series of 3am calls. At the dial tone, which is set to a horrifically unadjustable volume, I was woken from deep sleep to deep panic. "
That would be the ringtone. ( I suppose there are a large number of people who have never heard a dial tone.)
I went to the Badlands in August with my boyfriend and his recent ex’s son who lives with his mom and us at our house. Anyway, we couldn’t set up camp late one night because the site was full, so we got a cheap hotel room.
The kid picked up the phone in the room and said: “It’s making a noise.” Boyfriend said: “Maybe you called the front desk by mistake.” Kid said: “No, it’s some kind of buzzing noise.” Boyfriend laughed and said: “Oh, that’s the dial tone!” I immediately felt old. This ten-year-old didn’t know what a dial tone was.
It’s easy to forget that kids are growing up with different technology than we did. :)
I thought that anecdote was supposed to paint this picture of the overarching fear the author has with telephones. It's like a scene from a horror movie, I thought it was hilarious
Nothing wrong with someone posting their own stuff, if it's good. I haven't read this article, but presumably lots of HN upvoters have assessed it that way.
>Nothing wrong with someone posting their own stuff, if it's good. I haven't read this article, but presumably lots of HN upvoters have assessed it that way.
I didn't intend to imply there was anything wrong with it, I was only sharing an observation.
And yet, a number of people felt compelled to downvote me because of it.
Besides his emotional issues there author touches on a few great points.
1. Why do we use a loose, unstructured medium like voice for customer support and the script and restrict almost everything about it? Maybe basic support would be better in a different medium and only escalations go to phone?
2. Social engineering is still one of the most effective ways of hacking and the phone is a great medium for that. Yet we apparently year the phone like a more secure channel.
Because it is the most simplest and the most spread one? You don't need to sign up for yet-another-communication-service; you are not dependent on corporations like Facebook to conduct your business; you don't need to install an app.
Unreliable, easy to break, no way to contact a user back if they navigate away. Plus most small/medium business websites are simple, static pages currently, with no interactivity, let alone TLS to protect their users conversations.
I'd love it if my cell phone auto-screened calls from numbers not in my address book. Give them a special message that explains the only way they'll get through is to leave a message.
Or that they can register their number in a public registry that fully explains who they are and then I can decide whether to take calls from that number.
You can sort of do it with an iPhone. Put it on Do Not Disturb except for your contacts. But that will block alerts in addition to calls. I do use that setting at night when I'm traveling. Otherwise I end up sometimes getting junk calls in the middle of the night because of timezone differences.
We also could probably use a system of codes to communicate with automated calling systems so they give up quicker or are able to negotiate a fee they can pay to talk with you. Or leave a text message if you're open to that.
I never answer calls, ever. My voicemail suggests sending me an email. If the caller doesn't, it's like it never happened. The only reason I even have a SIM card is for data/tethering.
> I'd love it if my cell phone auto-screened calls from numbers not in my address book. Give them a special message that explains the only way they'll get through is to leave a message.
This feature existed (still exists?) for land lines as far back as 2000. It was an add-on service offered by MCI when they started to sell local service in NY and a few other markets. I imagine that it was probably available beyond MCI, but this is speculation.
Rarely can I get the same level of service out of companies over text that I can easily over the phone. Talking to a human over the phone is by far the most customer friendly medium of communication. I can do it without physically going anywhere, yet I get almost all the benefits of visiting the business.
Online chats on websites are usually undermanned and overall useless. On the phone I am sure I have at least one person's attention. The rep isn't trying to talk to five people at the same time, we can both focus on the issue, the back and forth is almost instantaneous, and we can come to some conclusion at the end.
Hahaha, like "using the phone" means "talking to a human", that's a good one.
Using the phone means
1. Listening to a long list of automated selections, none of which are ever useful (pretty much information more easily available over the Internet).
2. Getting placed on hold for tens of minutes or an hour or more.
3. Talking to someone who will ignore your question and ask if you have tried some obvious or irrelevant option.
4. Forwarded to someone else who might be able to help you with your problem.
5. Maybe getting cut off, needing to start the entire process over again from the beginning.
In short, without massive increases in staffing and training, using the phone for customer support is almost always worse than an equivalent text, web, or email based solution.
The article went into even more detail about these shortcomings than I did, by the way.
I have no trouble getting to a human in a reasonable time (under 10 minutes) as a regular customer for services like cable/Internet, mobile, building maintenance. And for business services I usually have a real person's card and a direct phone number to them.
I would find "under 10 minutes" to be a quite annoying amount of time, especially if I'm paying for them the premium rate that some customer services have.
I easily waste 10 minutes per online support chat waiting for the agent to deal with the 4 other cases they are on, fixing my typos because typing is worse than speaking and dealing with the context switching that comes from doing other stuff whilst waiting for them to respond.
Much better to start the call, get through the menu and then put my phone on the desk either on speaker or with a hands free set and doing something else whilst waiting for them, once I get the person on the phone I can then focus on the call and not other things.
At least in Germany, shouting "I WANT TO SPEAK TO A HUMAN" in an angry tone to the automated menu works all the time. I never wait for a real person more than one minute.
It's less about having one person's attention, and more about making the BATNA for solving your problem "customer ties up a CS agent for phone support at $10/hr until the problem gets solved".
I hate telephones too, and I DON'T have an anxiety disorder please!!!
I'm just not the guy always ready for a call. I rarely pick up the phone or open the door for a unknown call, and yes it can create stress. Quite often I am very focussed and balanced, one call can ruin that state. If you cannot find yourself in this, please don't create a disease out of it.
Some of us have a different problem, which is that our focus can endanger us or ruin our marriages. For us, it is easy to tune out things going on around us like phone calls, houses burning down, or our spouse repeating the same question with escalating irritation...
> 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.
If a ringing phone or a knock on the door causes you stress, rather than diagnose I’ll simply say: it doesn’t have to be that way. One can be focused while simultaneously not jumping at the sound of a ringing phone.
I used to hate them to a phobic degree, now I just hate them. I really dislike how much people are dismissing this. If I hated spiders, people wouldn't say "Oh you're just covering up an anxiety disorder".
Hang on - people aren't dismissing this as trivial; they're saying it's a common phobia (which is a form of anxiety disorder) and that there's good news: phobia is very treatable with a short course of therapy. That's freely available in England with short wait times.
Sure, but why should you treat it if it is not a disorder?
I think it is more a design issue with phones (than it is a phobia like for spiders).
Or rather: It is more a situation like if phones also happens to spew out huge spiders all over you in addition to letting you communicate remotely, and people get phobia as a result.
Why should I accept being woken up in the middle of the night for spam? Is this good design?, should I be "treated" to accept it?
Why should I be available 24/7 all the time for work? (design for PTSD?, more treatment yay...)
How come I can't use a secure medium to communicate to banks, or other services. (completely insane way to communicate securely)
The real insanity here: Forcing all people to use ancient remote voice communication and pretending it is even remotely secure. It might have been good enough way back, probably the only option, not so much in the current age of spam and digital communication.
There is a difference between disliking something, and having an adrenaline-driven fight or flight fear response to something.
OP doesn't just dislike phones that ring in the middle of the night. OP dislikes phones all day every day, and dislikes them to the extent that he has a physical reaction to them.
Also, I'm not saying that OP must get treatment. I've given OP a strategy to continue to avoid using phones if they want to do so: OP can using UK law to force companies to make "reasonable adjustments". OP can say they have a phone phobia, but OP may face resistance if he says that so he could say he has a hearing impairment. Companies should have things in place to make reasonable adjustments for people with hearing impairment.
Yes, I was half joking and only half serious. I would probably qualify for phone phobia myself and I also definitely prefer not to treat it with government programs or similar. Thus my answer.
As some other guy said: the only time people call is if they want something from you. Yes, but then I prefer to not be force to make an decision on the spot, rather think one minute and then answer, or preferable not be disturbed to begin with.
Some other guy quoted Scott Adams; And I agree "all phone calls have a victim, i.e. the person receiving the call".
So yes, I could qualify for phone phobia, but I don't think there is anything wrong with it, It is rather strange how people think phones are so natural and good, and must be used.
No, they are horrible and tools of evil.
And I'd rather not have a formal diagnose with a paper/digital trail of such a "sensitive" issue as hating phones, I prefer not be sucked into the mental health industry as a patient, prefer not doing the CBT training with exposure to phones or whatever, and I would not be forcing my employer to make even resonable adjustments (I'd rather adjust my employment to something else)
admittedly, although i also wouldn't class it as a mental disorder, i don't like using the phone. interestingly, i find i often have to have a cigarette to calm myself down before making or answering an important call...
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 had to disable my ringer for all callers, by default, and then manually, one at a time, set a custom ringtone for each of my contacts.
This is completely absurd. Why is it so hard to configure my phone to only allow my friends to interrupt me at any moment of the day, rather than any rando? Turns out, I might also hate telephones.
I've certainly thought about it (if anyone wants to suggest one they use, feel free), but I'm always held back by wondering whether or not those apps aren't simply yet another phone-number harvesting operation selling to spammers. (The fact that it would initially seem irrational to target people who are going out of their way to block spam callers would first require the entire notion of spam calling to be rational to begin with.)
They don’t store your contacts in the cloud and access to contacts is even optional (though they won’t be able to block spoofed ‘neighbor’ calls if you don’t give access, but they can label them).
They also market themselves as focused on privacy and they charge a $2/month subscription.
I haven’t gotten a spam call since I’ve used them.
That doesn't seem like a great idea. Like, one time my wife was hospitalized and they called to tell me. I think I would have been upset with myself if I didn't receive that call because I had installed an app to kill all calls from numbers I didn't recognize.
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 possible. You can keep your phone in "do not disturb" mode, and add people who you want to be able to call you to your "VIPs" list to let them through. That's a fair bit of manual management, though, which is a pain.
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.
Hiya exists for Android as well and has very high ratings [1]. I have used Android since v3 and you have been able to change the dialer to a custom app for at least that long.
You have also been able to limit ringing while in Do Not Disturb to starred contacts only, or even just "contacts" to eliminate the need to manage it like you mentioned [2].
Informative, thanks! I admit a notable chunk of my reasoning there was that the OP couldn't find a way to do it, so it probably wasn't built in. (I haven't used Android seriously in the last 5 years or so.)
Even pre-smartphone landline systems could block (or route direct to VM) numbers with blocked caller ID.
You absolutely can block such numbers in the stock Android phone app; some online sources indicate iOS lacks this basic feature, but I don't know if they are accurate and current.
That doesn't exist in the latest version of the app. If I go to Settings->Call Blocking it's just a button labeled "ADD A NUMBER" plus a list of blocked numbers. The ADD A NUMBER button triggers a popup with an input field that only allows phone numbers.
Spammers use a spoofed caller ID with the same first 3 digits as your phone number so it looks like a local number sO blocking them by number doesn’t really work.
I agree with you. I've tried to block each one of them for maybe months, but nothing's changed. I still get at least 2-3 calls each day from them. I think ignoring them is the best option for us now, or if you would, just answer their calls, ask their company name, and sue them because of their multiple calls. I just read about this at http://www.whycall.me/news/my-4500-payday-from-a-telemarkete....
Can't. You can block individual numbers, but there is no tool in the base Android to block all unknowns. Fortunately there are plenty of apps which will do exactly that - but I'm confused as to why I need to install an app to do something so simple.
The solution someone suggested elsewhere in this thread is to use make the default ringtone silence, then assign audible ringtones to all your contacts.
> 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.
> 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.
There's only 10,000,000,000 phone numbers, not even eliminating area codes that don't exist. I wonder if iOS will break on that...?
Even if the number changes every time? The common pattern lately is a number with the same leading six digits as my actual phone number, followed by a presumably falsified last four digits. As far as I know, these are randomly generated.
The problem with Hiya as I understand it is that it is limited by CallKit list size. I'm not 100% sure of this, but I think Apple's implementation requires a fully offline call list so that your phone calls are not sent to a public server and could be logged. This means that the number of phone numbers that Hiya can call spam must be downloaded ahead of time and loaded into CallKit. What I see often is that a phone number will not be flagged as spam, but if I query the number through the app later, it will correctly show it as spam. Someone correct my if I am wrong, but I think this is the problem.
I have my phone set to "Do Not Disturb" and it allows me to define that only starred contacts or regular contacts are allowed to get through. Given that most people I know rarely ever call I think it's a sane enough config setting. I have an Android Phone, more specifically an LG G5. No app required in my case, it's just hidden in the settings.
In practice... there's some groups who are still allowed to call you even if you're on the registry. Others will just ignore it, and filing a complaint is difficult.
I added all my numbers to this list a year or two ago and shortly after the spam calls started. Even on numbers that are not publicly used. (I have Google voice as my primary number and it calls my mobile number and a voip desk phone. Now all three get spam calls. I had them for years and the voip and mobile numbers were previously clean. )
I posted this elsewhere in this topic, but my experience with the Federal Do Not Call list was the exact opposite - they promised "within 3 months the calls would stop" and sure enough, within 3 months I never got another call.
Fair, I just checked and it looks like my number was already in the registry when they started getting worse a few years ago. (so adding it again probably did not cause the increase) You can use the site to see if you are already in, and when you were added. one of my numbers was added long before I had it.
You can file a complaint with the FTC but with the volume of calls and Caller ID spoofing it's probably more trouble than it's worth. Every now and then some operation gets taken down and fined but it's rare.
Consider yourself lucky to never gets calls of this type. Between the out and out scammers and pollsters/political calls/charities (the latter categories are protected from landline junk call bans), I routinely get 3 or 4 a day.
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...
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”.
Man i should get you to talk to my spam with that magic +5 robot charisma.
Unfortunately, it still won’t prevent my number from being spammed. There is no human to talk to. Any indication you are alive is a confirmation your phone number is worth calling. The only thing you can do to convince them is not answer or somehow communicate a likely disconnection from a human.
So have you tried the approach I am advocating for a meaningful amount of time, say a week or two, or are you just sure that it won't work and thus avoid it because you are worried that you will do things like confirm you are worth calling?
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.
A lot of the spam calls I get are just recordings or they just hang up once I pick up. Hard to imagine it would help to just say "please add me to your do not call list" into the void...
I also receive a lot of those (around ~5 a day, for more than 5 months already). It is really annoying and makes me wish I could just block numbers on my phone.
That you had some luck being removed from some legitimate call lists does not mean that you can dismiss these extremely common tactics as "Internet myths." There's a whole spectrum of spam callers that ranges from respectable businesses all the way to outright scammers. Some use illegal tactics like the ones you're trying to say are a myth and literally everyone I've ever talked to in person about the issue has had a similar experience.
The illegal tactics aren't what I am calling a myth. It's the idea that asking illegal callers to stop doesn't work that I am calling a myth. Even scammers are concerned with efficiency.
I mean, I get ~1 unwanted call a week across a couple of phone numbers (that I answer and ask to stop). Other people are saying that they get a dozen a day and giving up on their phones. My anecdotes work for me.
It's interesting that you assume it's a myth. I can personally attest to answering spam calls, politely asking to be added to the do not call list, and still receiving calls from the same spammers over a period of months. Eventually I just downloaded a call blacklist app.
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 other end' detection algorithm or what, but I went from 10-15 spam calls a day to 1 every few days. It took a little while, but it worked. Just don't answer strange numbers with a 'hello?', if someone's trying to reach you, they'll usually say it first.
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.
> 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 don't get that many spam calls, but what I do when I get one varies from answering and immediately hanging up to doing what you suggested (which usually results in them disconnecting after about 5 seconds). Occasionally, I've done things like answering the call and snapping my fingers in the receiver instead of saying "hello" and that usually results in an immediate disconnect.
I'm not sure if any of those things have affected the volume of spam calls I receive though.
Hey this is exactly what I do! Answer and then mute immediately. Any real person will just say "hello?" and the bots get confused and just hang up (and don't call back). I get 1 spam call every 2 months maybe.
> 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!
Anybody legitimate that's not true. But it's so easy to spoof your number that there are a lot of bad actors.
Are you talking about internal Do Not Call lists or the actual Federal Do Not Call list? Because I used to have that issue with credit card companies, random loan spammers, and such with both mail and phone call spam. I signed up for the list with a 100% opt-out option and just like it promised, within 3 months, the offers stopped coming in.
That being said, I also try to be pretty careful about putting my phone number out there, taking time to judge when a real phone number is needed or not, and asking pretty specifically for what reason a company wants my phone number and often just ignoring the service if an adequate reason isn't given.
Since I've moved abroad, I have apparently been less careful and I occasionally get calls and texts on my foreign sim, and I must have given my email out as there are suddenly lots of hot-singles looking for me, but it is 100% related to my current region, whereas before my Spam folder sat untouched.
Both really. Companies face fines if they keep calling people after they request to be put on a do not call list so it's a big deal. That's how I remember my experience at a call center anyway.
I used to work in tech at a call center and that would confuse the auto-dialer software. It's designed to know a person and designed to know voicemail. But just silence is a new one! Good strategy.
Many years ago I used to take the time to put the calling number into a ProComm script for a modem to dial repeatedly every 3 minutes for several hours, if they were toll free to me (expense to the original caller). I had way too much time on my hands then...
The best option I've turned up for most phones is:
1. Set a custom default ringtone.
2. Choose a silent wav file for this.
3. Assign a custom non-silent ringtone for selected known callers. (The ability to assign ringtones by groups helps here.)
Agreed that the situation is insane. I've stopped carrying a phone entirely, for this and other reasons. I can be reached, if necessary, by other means.
It also turns out that AT&T's chief lobbyist's contact inforation is available via FCC filings, and the number listed rings through to his voicemail. I've taken to letting him know about the spam phone call problem.
This isn't exactly what you're asking for but on Android: Settings > Sound > Do Not Disturb > Allowed in Priority Only > Calls From Contacts Only (or Calls from Starred Contacts Only if you really want to lock it down).
Optionally enable: If the same person calls a second time within a 15 minute period, allow it (might allow someone really trying to reach you to get through, might also allow a spam caller through).
I tried this on iOS and it doesn’t work well because it turns off all other notifications.
While calls do get through from your contacts, you don’t get notifications for anything.
I really just want a contacts whitelist, but since that isn’t an option I use nomorobo which is a subscription service that works really well to block spam calls for $2/month. It’s an iOS app, focuses on not uploading your stuff to their servers, and doesn’t collect your call logs.
I have an s7 and I star every important number. I use use IFTTT to enable DND automaticaly at 22.00 and disable it at 8.00. Is very convinient. I can also filter an app for example whatsapp to pass DND and ring.
Truecaller harvests all your contacts and sells them to third parties like sync.me (huge reverse phonebook). You should look up a few of your contacts’ numbers in there.
I receive a similar number of spam calls per day and have turned off my ringer entirely as a result. At first I used a feature that enables the ringer for the second call from the same number in a short period, but then the calls started coming in batches of 3 (usually all from the same number, but always from the same area code and prefix).
Instead of blocking the spam calls, it connects a bot that ties up the caller in a pointless conversation for as long as it can. I'm sure this would result in the telemarketers removing you from their lists themselves.
I implemented a system similar to this, where callers would be automatically given an explanation of not wanting to be called. After that they were put on a direct line with Rick Astley’s best hit.
It also customizes the message by looking for the caller number on spam services, and greeting them. At some point, I stopped receiving unwanted calls.
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.
"Exclusive Mover Savings
Get instant access to over $750 in valuable coupons
Safe and Secure
Safeguard your information with ID verification by a simple $1.00 charge to your credit or debit card
Speed and Convenience
Save a trip to the post office
Email Confirmation
Receive an immediate email confirmation of your Change of Address
MyMove.com Local Information, Tools and Offers
Make your move complete with catalog forwarding services, neighborhood deals and more at MyMove.com"
Privacy Policy excerpt:
"(e) to mailers, if already in possession of your name and old mailing address, as an address correction service. Information will also be provided to licensed service providers of the USPS to perform mailing list correction service of lists containing your name and old address. A list of these licensed service providers can be obtained at the following URL: http://ribbs.usps.gov/ncoalink /documents/tech_guides/CERTIFIED_LICENSEES"
^that returns a 404 for me
With a big blue "Agree and Continue" button... I certainly won't be entering my phone number in that form.
I will assume phone number can be considered part of "address" but it's unclear.
What they do is notify companies that already have your address of your new address. So (for example) your phone company and your magazine subscriptions are told of your new address.
That was an unexpectedly dramatic story. With his Patton-like determination and complete unsubtlety, he was very lucky that didn't get uglier! I was really afraid for him by the end...
The problem with Do Not Disturb mode is that it blocks all notifications, too, right? I've turned off every type of notification except the ones I want (just Google Hangouts, since I use it for work). So, I can choose to either have a phone that rings (which I never want to happen for anyone I don't know) or Hangouts that doesn't.
I will have to look into third-party apps. I never really considered it, as I use Google Voice and want to keep using it, and didn't really think about it maybe being possible to use Voice plus something else that deals with calls...it seems like Voice is already too intrusive to inject more stuff in there (my calls are already delayed by as much as a couple of seconds coming in and out because of Voice; seems like more would just guarantee that I can't answer legit calls before it goes to voicemail).
But, I do need to sort it out. Recently I've been getting multiple calls a day and have resorted to leaving my ringer off completely. My mom worries, though, if I don't answer for a while.
I've had a similar experience with the spam calls. I don't get quite as many per day, but ~90% of the calls I receive are spam. I just don't answer my phone anymore unless it's my wife, my mom, or one of my brothers. I direct all other calls to voicemail after grumbling about being interrupted.
I haven't found a good solution for auto directing spam calls to voicemail beyond using Do Not Disturb from 8 pm to 7 am.
May be not much convenient depending on the phone software, but you may consider setting default ring to something less noticable and/or demanding than “friendly ringtone” that you can set to selected contacts. There is also “don’t distract” mode afaik, with an ability to list contacts who can do it anyway.
Blocklist plus (app) on android totally solves this problem. Anything from either an unknown number or from something not in your address book gets routed directly to voicemail (doesnt even show up on your screen).
I recently switched my main phone to IOS and it is by far the feature I miss the most.
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.
I am not a lawyer, but if you can figure out who is calling you, I believe you can file a lawsuit against them for violating the TCPA (Telephone Consumer Protection Act), which carries statutory damages of up to $1,500 per violation.
Do you have T-Mobile? The Spam Caller thing is actually a feature they implemented a while back. You can set the system to block such calls, but the FCC wouldn’t let them automatically block calls without user permission.
I recently bought a land line phone because mobile reception in my house was terrible and attending work meetings was troublesome. One of these days I start getting spam on the landline and then I realised there is no "reject" or "silent" button. I had to pickup a call to reject it which seemed like a chore in the age of mobile phones.
I think that depends on the phone model. I recall owning a cordless home phone years ago where you could just hit the Hang Up button without answering first.
I strongly suspect it's your carrier preventing google from filtering these calls. I have google fi and it filters spam automatically (suspected spam at least disables ringer)
You can install apps on Android that you can fine-tune what happens when a call is incoming.
I set it up to immediately hang up any private numbers and not report a missed call, set it up to hang on up non-private numbers that are not in my address book and show a missed call, and it lets everyone else through who is in my address book.
Since doing this I couldn't be happier. I can't remember the last time I got an unsolicited call.
I don't have voicemail because I don't know how to set it up to have a recorded message that doesn't accept voicemails. I'd like to set it up so that I can say 'you can contact me on this email address' but not accept a voicemail message, then it'd be perfect.
The people who need to be able to contact me are already in my address book. Everyone else can send me an email.
> There's not even an option to silence the ringer for any call not from my contacts;
It's called Do Not Disturb, with Allow Exceptions, Calls from My Contacts Only. Android has it, and iOS does to (I think the options are even similarly named.)
> Why is it so hard to configure my phone to only allow my friends to interrupt me at any moment of the day, rather than any rando?
It's not that hard. EDIT: or maybe it is, because phones are complex devices with opaque UIs with poor discoverability. But the information is out there.
I must be a very different person compare to the author. I prefer phone calls a lot more than text/emails. Because I can usually get a result in a much shorter timespan.
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 point you will route calls to them over your VOIP network, they take calls, record the data (name and number). You pay them per hour to be on-call, your customers pay you per call, and for infrastructure you need an enterprise account with a VOIP provider, a web site, and a way to accept payments. (That might be what Answer America is doing, I don't know but it seems pretty doable)
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 weight clients" (that is an industry term from the guy who facilitates answering service sales). I don't know if this is possible in an uberized answering service.
Would answered calls be worth enough that people would pay a higher rate during higher demand periods? I honestly don't think so.
The industry could stand some innovation - it is severely lacking. Why is it that 70% of all answering service sites are not served with TLS?
(hint: proprietary answering service equipment vendors have choked the industry and now it can't innovate)
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.
I also manage a support team. Phone calls are indeed not very useful for solving issues, but they are critical for reducing customer anxiety and ensuring that you've understood their problem correctly.
Phone calls in isolation are terrible. I've worked as support for both older and newer service providers. For the older provider, calls reached support agents with all the customer's information readily available, and support agents had easy means to invite customers to screen sharing sessions, so they could see what we were looking at and we could discuss it together.
That said, some customers weren't able to share screens (typically because they were working with classified systems), so I acquired the fairly uncommon skill of directing people through a Unix system by speaking commands letter by letter in the NATO phonetic alphabet while navigating through my own example system. That was slow, but it worked, and was necessary given the restrictions.
With my newer service provider, phone support is seen as some sort of extra option in case of emergencies, and is treated more or less as a pager system. Calls come in with no context, we do not have screen sharing, and the experience is generally terrible for both the customer and support agent.
No means of support is inherently bad, but all means of contacting support have their limitations. Good support departments recognize those limitations and address them, so that all avenues of support are effective for either addressing an issue or communicating why it must be handled via another channel if it's not something that can be resolved at the point of contact.
If I don't recognize a number, or have a scheduled call, I will almost always let the call go to voicemail. Then I'll decide if the call warrants a call back. Usually it doesn't.
448 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 287 ms ] threadFor example, I can actually pretty much relate to this guy's feelings about telephones. Is it also caused by me having some mental disorders?
>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. The stand-off was only broken when mother texted me to tell me to answer the phone. I hate telephones.
> In many polls, people list their number one fear as “public speaking”, beating out “death” by some margin. Not me.
Perhaps for this reason the fear of talking to a stranger must be so strongly suppressed.
Personally, I also often feel uncomfortable when accepting a call from an unknown number, but I try to lean into the pain and pick up nevertheless. I actually think of my phone as something like a therapeutic device that allows me to practice talking to strangers and little by little the feeling of uncomfortableness will fade away...
My fear of phone is more among the line of "I might miss something _very_ important if I don't answer immediately." Unsolicited phone calls, and sometimes non-important phone calls make me very annoyed/angry to the point that sometimes I started yelling at caller over the phone. I know I shouldn't.
However, at the same time, I'm also scared of answering the phone from known or unknown callers since I _don't know_ what they're calling me for. Even such call is expected, I always assume they're to tell me a bad news. I'm fully aware it's absurd, but it's uncontrollable.
More elsewhere in thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15678214
I recently made the mistake of helping carry the load at work by answering the phone there. It's alright, mostly scripted, & my lack of customer friendliness (Surprising the amount of silence yes/no answers invoke) will hopefully transition us away from having a developer handling support calls soon
You do realize those annoying customers wouldn't have anything to call about if it without those introverted developers who are busy programming whatever's been management's whim since last sprint?
A lot of jobs are important. That doesn't imply that everyone should want to do every job.
Customer support is just one job among many. And disliking customer support isn't disliking customers.
More companies might need to accelerate towards offering text/chat options for their customer service if they don't already. It may not directly put a customer off, but it might be another signal in a list of comparisons that pushes the scales in favour of a competitor.
There seems to be some principle in play where the misuse of a communications channel rises to the point where it's annoying but not quite unusable. If I got 20 junk calls a day, I'd have to turn my phone off. As it is, it's at nuisance level but still usable.
- Until we switched wholesale to a videoconferencing provider, I pretty much needed a landline for work purposes. In addition to just routine conference calls, our webcast provider wanted us on landlines when we gave webinars and I had little desire to go into the office at 11pm at night for the Asia Pacific webcast slot.
- I get poor cellphone reception at my house. Not really an issue now with WiFi assist but I pretty much needed a landline (actually Comcast triple-play) before that.
- I preferred having phones throughout the house and having an emergency backup.
- I like/liked the ability to give out a legitimate phone number that is not my cell.
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.
Of the residents I know for sure do or don't have a land line, they are the only ones.
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.
As I recall the service was also extremely inexpensive as part of a DSL bundle. It is true that the landline was a powerful spam magnet, much more so than my cell.
AFAIK, it's not super-cheap with Comcast especially as it uses a different modem than my Internet service.
One of the reasons that landlines are more of a spam magnet is that a lot of call types are exempted from the do not call list on landlines but not cell phones. There may be other reasons as well.
If the power is off for days it means the Apocalypse or WW3 has happened.
Just this last winter thousands in New Brunswick were left with no power in the dead of winter for over a week.
In your case PSTN was the "stable fallback" but there is nothing inherent in the technology that makes this so. Your phone stations still need power, and if they don't have backup power they'll be dead as well.
Cables have a bigger chance of breaking if they're in the air, less so if they're buried. Of course, PSTN, power and fiber can all be both in the air or buried. There's nothing inherent in any of them that make them more "resilient". So if you live in an area where your PSTN is buried and your power lines aren't, it might to lead you to conclude that PSTN is "stable", in fact there's nothing about PSTN in itself that makes it so.
In a lot of places, cell towers will have backup power as well, and so will fiber networks, and your power network might be (should be, probably) buried and better protected than your other cables.
The ringer on it is turned off though, I've never given out the number to anyone. Nor do I ever use it.
It's nice to know it's there though, I guess as a last resort in emergency situations.
Also, text is not always a the best way of communicating- a lot of information is conveyed in someone’s voice which is often difficult to put on paper. It can also be way faster to speak to someone, particularly where a problem is a little complex and requires information to be exchanged between both parties multiple times.
I accidentally started a fight on HN by typing the exact opposite of my views, or at least something that could apparently be interpreted that way. I don't think I would have been misunderstood in the same manner in speech.
In speech your voice determines your tone. In text your reader determines your tone.
The middle of the bell curve for a particular trait (e.g. talking on the telephone) is normal - so about 90% of the population.
You want to redefine the word normal. OK, sure. What should I use? Different? Strange? Unique? Flower? Snowflake? I don't know. Sounds pretty odd behaviour to me. Not wrong, not bad, not dirty. Just weird. Odd. Not normal.
I get to decide because i am human and humans make assessments about things and people.
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.
Its ironic that his anxiety prevents him from getting diagnosed / treated for it. Probably quite common in mental health.
I'm sure you didn't mean it that way, but it's still something we all need to have the discipline and good taste to avoid. If we have to we'll add it to https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, but I'd rather avoid having a laundry list of verbotens.
I do wonder what you'd say if someone described a physical health problem and people suggested they go see a physical health doctor.
Missed calls and voicemail show up in my email, transcribed to text and everything.
Given this, there is usually no reason to have a phone that can be rung by arbitrary callers.
Also, has call quality completely tanked in the last decade or is it just me?
Opus will hopefully end the mish-mash of codecs that currently permeate telephony, as it is much higher quality at lower bitrates, and unlike GSM, ulaw, and even G722 (which some call HD Voice) it can handle packet loss gracefully. Makes all commonly used codecs look terrible in comparison.
I have a publicly listed number (in addition to a private one), and I have not received a spam call this year even once. When people call my phone, it is warranted.
Telephones remain the best way to contact emergency services, or settle things which you have no option to settle in person.
My first preference is a screenshare or video conference, so I can see what they see. Second is a phone call. Third is live chat like IRC or Slack and emails are a distant last place.
I don't hear, so I don't phone. However some business is almost impossible to conduct without phoning. AWS requires identification by phone. Customs tried to call me to ask me something about my bike I sent home from a holiday abroad. Credit cards are only unblocked by a phone call. And so on. (And phone relays are only a partial solution because some commpanies deem them insecure - I have currently a credit card I was not able to unblock, I will send them a cancellation notice.)
So, in other words, it's not hatred or perhaps an anxiety disorder, but a real discrimination of a disability, which leads me to agree with Mr Fisher.
Perhaps they have different identification rules for people not in the US.
And since texting (mobile short message service) TTY slowly went out of use, at least here in Switzerland. I still own a TTY device, however I haven't used it for more than ten years.
An interesting technical tidbit here: My TTY is using V.21, however with only one channel and with 110 baud. I researched the TTY with recording on a sound card and analysing the tones. Bit 0 is represented by a sinus wave of 1180Hz, 1 by 980Hz with a duration of 9.1ms each. A byte was transferred with 10 bits (total duration 91ms), 1 bit was a stop bit and the other one a parity bit (I am not sure, I forgot some details). Additionally there was a carrier tone at 1080Hz which was held for about 3 seconds after the last byte has been sent.
This means it was not possible that both parties simultaneously send. We had a convention that the other party is allowed to answer when we type two asterisks.
A phone relay service in Switzerland still continues to use this convention in their JavaScript application. It is a simulation of the old TTY device they sold to people. I think they had to use websockets because every letter is sent to the other party right away.
https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/711-telecommunications-...
It's easier to lie and say "I'm deaf" because they have some awareness of that.
Also, in England, you can self refer to IAPT and most people start under 6 weeks and 96% of people start under 18 weeks.
> 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.
That meets the UK legal definition of a disability, and under UK law he can ask for reasonable adjustments to avoid telephones. He could give his mental health status as the reason he needs the reasonable adjustment, but most places won't know much about that, and so it would be easier if he used hearing impairment - many places know about hearing impairment, and have processes in place to avoid telephone use.
Maybe I should have said I'm speaking from personal experience: I've got a bank and some bits of government departments and some bits of the NHS to use email rather than telephone with me.
That would be the ringtone. ( I suppose there are a large number of people who have never heard a dial tone.)
The kid picked up the phone in the room and said: “It’s making a noise.” Boyfriend said: “Maybe you called the front desk by mistake.” Kid said: “No, it’s some kind of buzzing noise.” Boyfriend laughed and said: “Oh, that’s the dial tone!” I immediately felt old. This ten-year-old didn’t know what a dial tone was.
It’s easy to forget that kids are growing up with different technology than we did. :)
I didn't intend to imply there was anything wrong with it, I was only sharing an observation.
And yet, a number of people felt compelled to downvote me because of it.
1. Why do we use a loose, unstructured medium like voice for customer support and the script and restrict almost everything about it? Maybe basic support would be better in a different medium and only escalations go to phone? 2. Social engineering is still one of the most effective ways of hacking and the phone is a great medium for that. Yet we apparently year the phone like a more secure channel.
What else would you use?
Or that they can register their number in a public registry that fully explains who they are and then I can decide whether to take calls from that number.
"But you won't be able to receive calls!", the salesperson objected.
"Perfect."
I only answer the call if it is my parents calling.
This feature existed (still exists?) for land lines as far back as 2000. It was an add-on service offered by MCI when they started to sell local service in NY and a few other markets. I imagine that it was probably available beyond MCI, but this is speculation.
Source: worked there at the time
Online chats on websites are usually undermanned and overall useless. On the phone I am sure I have at least one person's attention. The rep isn't trying to talk to five people at the same time, we can both focus on the issue, the back and forth is almost instantaneous, and we can come to some conclusion at the end.
Using the phone means
1. Listening to a long list of automated selections, none of which are ever useful (pretty much information more easily available over the Internet). 2. Getting placed on hold for tens of minutes or an hour or more. 3. Talking to someone who will ignore your question and ask if you have tried some obvious or irrelevant option. 4. Forwarded to someone else who might be able to help you with your problem. 5. Maybe getting cut off, needing to start the entire process over again from the beginning.
In short, without massive increases in staffing and training, using the phone for customer support is almost always worse than an equivalent text, web, or email based solution.
The article went into even more detail about these shortcomings than I did, by the way.
Much better to start the call, get through the menu and then put my phone on the desk either on speaker or with a hands free set and doing something else whilst waiting for them, once I get the person on the phone I can then focus on the call and not other things.
I'm just not the guy always ready for a call. I rarely pick up the phone or open the door for a unknown call, and yes it can create stress. Quite often I am very focussed and balanced, one call can ruin that state. If you cannot find yourself in this, please don't create a disease out of it.
> 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.
I think it is more a design issue with phones (than it is a phobia like for spiders).
Or rather: It is more a situation like if phones also happens to spew out huge spiders all over you in addition to letting you communicate remotely, and people get phobia as a result.
Why should I accept being woken up in the middle of the night for spam? Is this good design?, should I be "treated" to accept it?
Why should I be available 24/7 all the time for work? (design for PTSD?, more treatment yay...)
How come I can't use a secure medium to communicate to banks, or other services. (completely insane way to communicate securely)
The real insanity here: Forcing all people to use ancient remote voice communication and pretending it is even remotely secure. It might have been good enough way back, probably the only option, not so much in the current age of spam and digital communication.
OP doesn't just dislike phones that ring in the middle of the night. OP dislikes phones all day every day, and dislikes them to the extent that he has a physical reaction to them.
Also, I'm not saying that OP must get treatment. I've given OP a strategy to continue to avoid using phones if they want to do so: OP can using UK law to force companies to make "reasonable adjustments". OP can say they have a phone phobia, but OP may face resistance if he says that so he could say he has a hearing impairment. Companies should have things in place to make reasonable adjustments for people with hearing impairment.
As some other guy said: the only time people call is if they want something from you. Yes, but then I prefer to not be force to make an decision on the spot, rather think one minute and then answer, or preferable not be disturbed to begin with.
Some other guy quoted Scott Adams; And I agree "all phone calls have a victim, i.e. the person receiving the call".
So yes, I could qualify for phone phobia, but I don't think there is anything wrong with it, It is rather strange how people think phones are so natural and good, and must be used. No, they are horrible and tools of evil.
And I'd rather not have a formal diagnose with a paper/digital trail of such a "sensitive" issue as hating phones, I prefer not be sucked into the mental health industry as a patient, prefer not doing the CBT training with exposure to phones or whatever, and I would not be forcing my employer to make even resonable adjustments (I'd rather adjust my employment to something else)
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 had to disable my ringer for all callers, by default, and then manually, one at a time, set a custom ringtone for each of my contacts.
This is completely absurd. Why is it so hard to configure my phone to only allow my friends to interrupt me at any moment of the day, rather than any rando? Turns out, I might also hate telephones.
They don’t store your contacts in the cloud and access to contacts is even optional (though they won’t be able to block spoofed ‘neighbor’ calls if you don’t give access, but they can label them).
They also market themselves as focused on privacy and they charge a $2/month subscription.
I haven’t gotten a spam call since I’ve used them.
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 possible. You can keep your phone in "do not disturb" mode, and add people who you want to be able to call you to your "VIPs" list to let them through. That's a fair bit of manual management, though, which is a pain.
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.
[1]: https://imgur.com/a/Yftxy
You have also been able to limit ringing while in Do Not Disturb to starred contacts only, or even just "contacts" to eliminate the need to manage it like you mentioned [2].
[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.webascende...
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15678075
You absolutely can block such numbers in the stock Android phone app; some online sources indicate iOS lacks this basic feature, but I don't know if they are accurate and current.
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.
There's only 10,000,000,000 phone numbers, not even eliminating area codes that don't exist. I wonder if iOS will break on that...?
(I've never received a spam call on my now 20 year old phone number.)
In practice... there's some groups who are still allowed to call you even if you're on the registry. Others will just ignore it, and filing a complaint is difficult.
Consider yourself lucky to never gets calls of this type. Between the out and out scammers and pollsters/political calls/charities (the latter categories are protected from landline junk call bans), I routinely get 3 or 4 a day.
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...
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.
Unfortunately, it still won’t prevent my number from being spammed. There is no human to talk to. Any indication you are alive is a confirmation your phone number is worth calling. The only thing you can do to convince them is not answer or somehow communicate a likely disconnection from a human.
The internet myth is that this marks you as someone to keep calling (because you listened), but really they will stop.
I mean, I get ~1 unwanted call a week across a couple of phone numbers (that I answer and ask to stop). Other people are saying that they get a dozen a day and giving up on their phones. My anecdotes work for me.
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 other end' detection algorithm or what, but I went from 10-15 spam calls a day to 1 every few days. It took a little while, but it worked. Just don't answer strange numbers with a 'hello?', if someone's trying to reach you, they'll usually say it first.
I don't get that many spam calls, but what I do when I get one varies from answering and immediately hanging up to doing what you suggested (which usually results in them disconnecting after about 5 seconds). Occasionally, I've done things like answering the call and snapping my fingers in the receiver instead of saying "hello" and that usually results in an immediate disconnect.
I'm not sure if any of those things have affected the volume of spam calls I receive though.
Anybody legitimate that's not true. But it's so easy to spoof your number that there are a lot of bad actors.
That being said, I also try to be pretty careful about putting my phone number out there, taking time to judge when a real phone number is needed or not, and asking pretty specifically for what reason a company wants my phone number and often just ignoring the service if an adequate reason isn't given.
Since I've moved abroad, I have apparently been less careful and I occasionally get calls and texts on my foreign sim, and I must have given my email out as there are suddenly lots of hot-singles looking for me, but it is 100% related to my current region, whereas before my Spam folder sat untouched.
1. Set a custom default ringtone.
2. Choose a silent wav file for this.
3. Assign a custom non-silent ringtone for selected known callers. (The ability to assign ringtones by groups helps here.)
Agreed that the situation is insane. I've stopped carrying a phone entirely, for this and other reasons. I can be reached, if necessary, by other means.
It also turns out that AT&T's chief lobbyist's contact inforation is available via FCC filings, and the number listed rings through to his voicemail. I've taken to letting him know about the spam phone call problem.
Bob Quinn.
Optionally enable: If the same person calls a second time within a 15 minute period, allow it (might allow someone really trying to reach you to get through, might also allow a spam caller through).
While calls do get through from your contacts, you don’t get notifications for anything.
I really just want a contacts whitelist, but since that isn’t an option I use nomorobo which is a subscription service that works really well to block spam calls for $2/month. It’s an iOS app, focuses on not uploading your stuff to their servers, and doesn’t collect your call logs.
I advertise for that around me. Operators can stop that if they want.
Very frustrating
Instead of blocking the spam calls, it connects a bot that ties up the caller in a pointless conversation for as long as it can. I'm sure this would result in the telemarketers removing you from their lists themselves.
It also customizes the message by looking for the caller number on spam services, and greeting them. At some point, I stopped receiving unwanted calls.
I recently moved and immediately found the number of spam calls increase drastically. From 1-2 a week to ten a day.
"Exclusive Mover Savings Get instant access to over $750 in valuable coupons Safe and Secure Safeguard your information with ID verification by a simple $1.00 charge to your credit or debit card Speed and Convenience Save a trip to the post office Email Confirmation Receive an immediate email confirmation of your Change of Address MyMove.com Local Information, Tools and Offers Make your move complete with catalog forwarding services, neighborhood deals and more at MyMove.com"
Privacy Policy excerpt: "(e) to mailers, if already in possession of your name and old mailing address, as an address correction service. Information will also be provided to licensed service providers of the USPS to perform mailing list correction service of lists containing your name and old address. A list of these licensed service providers can be obtained at the following URL: http://ribbs.usps.gov/ncoalink /documents/tech_guides/CERTIFIED_LICENSEES" ^that returns a 404 for me
With a big blue "Agree and Continue" button... I certainly won't be entering my phone number in that form.
I will assume phone number can be considered part of "address" but it's unclear.
What they do is notify companies that already have your address of your new address. So (for example) your phone company and your magazine subscriptions are told of your new address.
They don't sell or disclose phone numbers.
There is also no way to opt out.
https://gimletmedia.com/episode/long-distance/
If that's not to your liking a third party app would most likely be all you need.
I will have to look into third-party apps. I never really considered it, as I use Google Voice and want to keep using it, and didn't really think about it maybe being possible to use Voice plus something else that deals with calls...it seems like Voice is already too intrusive to inject more stuff in there (my calls are already delayed by as much as a couple of seconds coming in and out because of Voice; seems like more would just guarantee that I can't answer legit calls before it goes to voicemail).
But, I do need to sort it out. Recently I've been getting multiple calls a day and have resorted to leaving my ringer off completely. My mom worries, though, if I don't answer for a while.
Another good idea: a phone call from an unknown caller should be alerted with a short text stating who they are and what they want.
I haven't found a good solution for auto directing spam calls to voicemail beyond using Do Not Disturb from 8 pm to 7 am.
I recently switched my main phone to IOS and it is by far the feature I miss the most.
Sources:
https://michaelrkn.github.io/how-to-sue-a-telemarketer/
https://www.forbes.com/sites/legalnewsline/2016/08/25/filing...
Criminals from India call us here in AUS pretending to be from some legitimate call centre, advising us of some non-existent government rebate.
[0] http://explore.t-mobile.com/callprotection
I set it up to immediately hang up any private numbers and not report a missed call, set it up to hang on up non-private numbers that are not in my address book and show a missed call, and it lets everyone else through who is in my address book.
Since doing this I couldn't be happier. I can't remember the last time I got an unsolicited call.
I don't have voicemail because I don't know how to set it up to have a recorded message that doesn't accept voicemails. I'd like to set it up so that I can say 'you can contact me on this email address' but not accept a voicemail message, then it'd be perfect.
The people who need to be able to contact me are already in my address book. Everyone else can send me an email.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.vladlee.bl...
Also, some Android phones seem to allow you to block calls from unknown numbers:
https://community.ee.co.uk/t5/4G-and-mobile-data/How-to-bloc...
It's called Do Not Disturb, with Allow Exceptions, Calls from My Contacts Only. Android has it, and iOS does to (I think the options are even similarly named.)
> Why is it so hard to configure my phone to only allow my friends to interrupt me at any moment of the day, rather than any rando?
It's not that hard. EDIT: or maybe it is, because phones are complex devices with opaque UIs with poor discoverability. But the information is out there.
Someone wants somethings from me ("please can you do this or that for me"). Or it's bad news. :-/
Email and text messages are better tools for me: you answer when you want to whom you want.
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 point you will route calls to them over your VOIP network, they take calls, record the data (name and number). You pay them per hour to be on-call, your customers pay you per call, and for infrastructure you need an enterprise account with a VOIP provider, a web site, and a way to accept payments. (That might be what Answer America is doing, I don't know but it seems pretty doable)
Anyway, the big problem with this concept is the profitability of answering services is predicated on constantly changing the rates and dropping "dead weight clients" (that is an industry term from the guy who facilitates answering service sales). I don't know if this is possible in an uberized answering service.
Would answered calls be worth enough that people would pay a higher rate during higher demand periods? I honestly don't think so.
The industry could stand some innovation - it is severely lacking. Why is it that 70% of all answering service sites are not served with TLS?
(hint: proprietary answering service equipment vendors have choked the industry and now it can't innovate)
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.
I use Twilio with a small bit of code to call their APIs when I receive a voicemail, and send me an SMS transcription of the content of the audio.
Costs much less than $1 a call!
I manage teams of support engineers/agents.
They will do anything to avoid a phone call.
Indeed, almost all the time, phone calls lead nowhere, only to emotional distress.
If you have a really serious issue, you need to escalate to an actual software/platform engineer, and that's something that takes hours, if not days.
That said, some customers weren't able to share screens (typically because they were working with classified systems), so I acquired the fairly uncommon skill of directing people through a Unix system by speaking commands letter by letter in the NATO phonetic alphabet while navigating through my own example system. That was slow, but it worked, and was necessary given the restrictions.
With my newer service provider, phone support is seen as some sort of extra option in case of emergencies, and is treated more or less as a pager system. Calls come in with no context, we do not have screen sharing, and the experience is generally terrible for both the customer and support agent.
No means of support is inherently bad, but all means of contacting support have their limitations. Good support departments recognize those limitations and address them, so that all avenues of support are effective for either addressing an issue or communicating why it must be handled via another channel if it's not something that can be resolved at the point of contact.