Excellent. I needed that laugh tonight!

Same here, I have caller ID and look at it before pressing the green button. Not saying that I will not answer but have had enough "spam" calls.

I answer 99% of the time without checking the number. All of my phones are on the "Do not call list" and they are all unlisted. Very rarely do I get calls from people I don't know or don't want to talk to. The few unwanted sales calls or whatever that get through... I love to dick with them. One of my favorites is to tell the caller that I am on another line and if they can hold for a couple minutes. Five minutes of hold time later (ignore time) I take them off hold and say politely that its going to be another couple of minutes. Repeat step one. If they haven't figured it out by then (which many don't) and I don't have anything else important to do at the moment I'll keep it going till they hang up or I get bored with the game. I know, flame me for being evil. I hate unwanted calls!

I just tell them that " he(Me) passed away" sometimes they apologize:D

"Can't believe you guys are such hard a$$es and yet your afraid to pick up a phone."

Agree somewhat. Plus when you don't have tv you find entertainment elsewhere. I've had some enjoyable times with telemarketers.
Jim

I'm in the movie business and it has a lot of private numbers and blocked lines. If someone calls my cell, it's someone who knows me, or wants to talk to me about one of my shows. I pretty much have to answer my cell when it rings. I had two "emergency" calls regarding shows tonight.

I check the ID, but I usually answer if I'm not at work. If i'm there, they can leave a voice mail/text and I will return the call/text. You never know when a hot woman or a really high paying job will call.:D

My wife will drop whatever she is doing to answer the phone if she knows the caller. That means we stop movies, she stops eating, she stops reading, she stops gardening if she hears the phone ring inside the garage. She has an older brother in bad shape, so every call is the critical one, she thinks. He's been quasi ill for 20 years and will probably outlive me.

I'm not the complete opposite, but close. If I'm not busy, which is most the time at home, I pick up the phone..... if it's not her family calling. And boy, does she get mad when I ignore the phone when it's for her and she can't get there in time before the machine starts. :D

I'm really considering eliminating the hard phone line. The only thing the hard line does is make faxing easier and caller ID shows up on the TV screen. Is that worth $400 a year? I don't think so...

Me too.

Only the cordless phones in my house have call display, so I seldom look.

I have a Pavlovian response to a ringing telephone. I grew up in a rural area in the days of hand-cranked telephones and we had the switchboard in our house. By the time I was 10, I was answering calls, "Number please?" The 'board was taken out when dial came into the area in '76, but old habits die hard.

I also do co-ordination for an energy audit service from my home, so it might be a client for whom I've left a message. What the heck? If I don't want to talk to someone, I can hang up.

I suspect we get far fewer "harassing and intermittent" junk calls than most folks, though.

Les

Up until a few months ago, I worked in a military operations center. I had 5 different phones on my desk that I used regularly. So similar to oldE, I CANNOT ignore a ringing phone. All of our secure phones have caller ID and we typically answer with "operations center" followed by our rank & last name. However, we had this one "special phone." It's a plain old single-line red desk phone. It's not nuclear C2 related, but when it rings, it means our day is going to get a lot busier. One day while I was on shift, it starts ringing and the Pavlovian response was incredible... the whole ops center stopped and looked at it. I walked over and answered it "hello?..." A voice on the other end said, "hi, um... yes, I'd like to order....uh, is this Papa John's pizza?" I politely told he had the wrong number and everyone in the ops center busted out laughing (in relief mostly). Turns out that number was similar to local Papa Johns. We got more than a few pizza orders before we had the number changed this past summer.

Instead of Papa Johns, somehow we are crosslinked with a MacDonalds 20 miles away in Long Beach. Started about 5 years ago we get 6-8 calls a year from them. I've tried several times to correct it via the restaurant and Verizon. The number they say they are dialing is not close to our number. So whether is a bad speed dialer or a Verizon switch, I no longer am polite. If MacD calls and I'm near a phone, I pick it up and hang it up without saying a word. I know that's rude, but so are they for not fixing this issue. We've had the same number, sans area code, since 1982. Actually, I think it's working a little because we getting fewer calls, but got one just a month ago, so it's not fixed.

I'd go one step further. I'd pretend to be whoever they were calling. I'd start throwing them curveballs. "We don't have any potatoes here, but I can ship you 500 lbs of rutabaga. You can make fries with that."

I've found the only way to make people not call you, be it telemarketers or repeat wrong numbers, is to make it inconvenient for them to call you.

Never. And I have an unlisted number. Even so, the morons are starting to get hold of it so I find myself rejecting more and more calls these days and letting them go to voicemail.

My time is too important (even now out-of-work) to waste my time on silly nonsense or people wanting me to do such-and-such survey or to try and sell me crap I neither need nor want.

It's kind of sad really - I was always taught to be polite, cordial and responsive to people on the phone, but at some point when people started looking at everyone else as nothing more than a potential source of money and placed the value of those peoples' potential dollars above the value of their time and privacy I had to draw the line.

The "do-not-call" list was a wonderful idea, but so-called "direct marketers" have been thumbing their noses at this piece of legislation (and its underlying message) more and more as of late.

Honestly if all of the unsolicited mass-mailers and (especially) callers/e-mailers vanished from the face of the earth tomorrow, I'd consider it a step forward. If you feel the need to force a product or service onto me without my coming to you inquiring about it first, I probably don't need it and you're already off on the wrong foot with me. I can think of no time in my entire life where I let an unsolicited call turn into a sale - deliberately. Aside from the fact that they're almost universally for things I don't need, I quite deliberately avoid rewarding those sorts of tactics with business. Even if someone were to (hypothetically) call me with something I wanted, I'd reject them just to avoid rewarding the tactic.

That is a classic! Made my day.

This is not phone related, but email. Some nut job got my work email. He was one of those that didn't like what our client's position was so he thought he would take it out on me and a few others. Legal counsel told us he had first amendment rights and we just had to sit and take it. It was really bad stuff.

Anyway what we did was write an easy auto response to the turd that copied each of our email addresses, erased the response to us and sent him an auto reply. Worked like a charm. It shut his mail down in a flash.

Our attorney got a call from him or his esquire complaining. Our little group refused to stop doing it until he agreed to stop harassing us. It worked like a charm.

Now if there was a way to do this counter attack against the phone annoyances.

We went to the Vonage cheapo plan for like 12 bucks a months and we NEVER answer the home phone period

Whats caller ID? When Sara plugs the call through we usually chat about things then she lets me know who's calling.

http://i50.photobucket.com/albums/f3.../Ernestine.gif

This is an interesting thread because it reveals some generational delineations as well as emerging etiquette, (which is always a step or two behind new technology). People who grew up before cell phones, caller ID or even answering machines always answer their phones out of habit. I no longer answer every call because of aforementioned new etiquette that it's rude to answer a cell phone when you are sitting talking to someone but it took some getting used to for me. (Not answering the phone).

I have a home phone that hardly ever rings and when it does, I don't answer it. I've switched all communication to my cell/Blackberry/email, so it's only for my DSL and entry system of my building. (Intercom linked to land lines in apartments). It's still weird for me not to answer a phone, I just sit there and stare at it as it rings away. It can only be a sales call or a wrong #.

If I'm alone I generally answer my phone but if they open with, "is this (my name)?", I do not and will not acknowledge or identify myself until they do. If it's a company, I ask what it's regarding. Once in a blue freaking moon it's actually a doctor's office or someone I will talk to, usually they never get to find out if they talked to me or not. This has never changed; old-fashioned telephone etiquette requires that callers identify themselves immediately when someone answers. You never, never make a call and ask, "is this so-and-so" when someone answers. Obviously these rules can be relaxed with family and very close friends, but I never make a wife walk across a room to hand the phone to her husband wondering who the **** that was who just asked for him. It's common manners and decency, but it ain't so common any more. :cool:

During the day our phone doesnt get screened unless it's a customer that has some asinine request that we refuse to waste our time with. Now since the same number rings to the house it gets screened like a MOFO after 5 and on the weekends. All the important customers that make emergency calls have the bosses(my dad) cell number which is never screened.

We don't have caller ID... it's just not worth the extra $40-50 a year to us, and there really isn't anyone in our lives we want to avoid at all costs... and we'll hang up on a telemarketer in a heartbeat.

When it rings, if it's convenient to get it, we'll answer it... otherwise, the machine can get it. If we have guests over and don't want interruptions, we'll turn the ringer off and turn the volume all the way down on the machine.

TerryH, I sympathize with you... that must be maddening for the wifey to have that attitude... my wife and I are definitely on the same page on this. Sometimes, we cover for one another; like if I'm halfway expecting a call/callback that needs to be taken before it goes to the machine, but she's busy or doesn't want to talk to anyone and a call comes for her, I'll just say she's busy and take their number... and vice versa if I'm busy, etc.