Are you plagued by nuisance calls and what is your strategy for dealing with them?
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As an electronics engineer who is often plagued by nuisance calls despite being on the Telephone Preference Service, I have an idea.
I propose a small filter box that sits under the phone. It has an answer phone built in.
When you plug it in, it has no memories, but as calls come in, you press a Bar Call button any time during the call if you don;t want to hear from that caller again.
When the phone rings, the box recognises the incoming number and remembers if it is on the Barred list. If it is, it just gets diverted to the answer phone - and your phone does not actually ring at all!
If the number is NOT on the Barred list, the phone rings, and you answer it.
Yes, you have to pay for Caller ID, but this is cheap. Good idea? Shall I get designing?
One thing you have to be careful with is not to be too hasty. I received a call a few days ago and thought it was a nuisance call and was just about to say 'not interested' (my usual comment), when the caller said it was Alison from the surgery and wanted to ask me a question re my prescription. She apologised for taking a second or two to react to my 'Hello' as she was busy trying to do two things at once as usual.
My son did this, waited until they got near to the end and started screaming 'No, what have you doen, it's all gone, all my work, my livlihood, alll gone, nooooo!'. Funnily enough they rang off. 🙂
I like to think that the forty minutes he spent with me was forty minutes that he could not hurt anyone else:-). Job Done!
We are registered on www.tpsonline.org.uk/ but even that didn't stop them all. I have done same as Sally Ann but in the end rang BT & they gave us a new number that is also ex directory - that was a year ago & has worked so far! 🙂