OK and thanks for explaning.
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Not loose - lose
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I don’t understand why anyone would want to make an anonymous call. If you call someone, you have already decided that you either have business with them or you want to have business with them. If you were to call me anonymously, you would never be able to reach me because I do not answer anonymous calls and I had my voicemail turned off at the carrier level. And you can block anyone later who does not respect you after they have your phone number. I don’t think I have ever been called by any government. I would never believe that any call to me was actually from any government, even if it was from a legitimate government agency. Anyone can say they are from the government. Legitimate contacts initiated from governments to private individuals never come via phone introduction. They send you snail mail and you then call them.
Rather than play some kind of game with the people who you call, the idea should be to block and ignore anyone and everyone who does not respect you. You can never succeed at keeping your number truely private. Scammers and sales people start a calling list by (for example) calling 234-0000 and calling every number sequentially through 234-9999. If your number is anywhere in that sequence, they will call it. So no number is private. Why pretend that it is private? Let anyone who wants to sell my number, sell my number. My number is useless information to anyone who I do not want to talk to.
Unless I recognize the incoming number as someone who I know and trust, I give them almost zero chance to talk to me. If it’s a business name that I have not contacted them first or that I don’t consider to be friendly in advance of their call to me, then I don’t answer. If it is from a person’s name that I do not want to hear from, then I do not answer it. If it is from an anonymous number, then I don’t answer it. I do answer numbers with a person’s name in the caller ID. But I don’t allow that caller to give me any kind of a sales pitch unless we already have an established working relationship or friendship in advance of their call to me.
So my incoming calls that are identified by a person’s name in the caller ID go something like this: ring, hello, hello (formal sounding greeting) my name is…, click-I hang up never knowing nor caring what their name was. Next call: ring, hello, hi is this Steve?, yes (I use a stern impatient sounding voice) who is calling?, this is (formal sounding voice)…, click-I hung up. Next call: ring, hello, is the man of the house in?, click-I hung up. Next call: ring, hello, hi is this Steve?, yes (I use a stern impatient sounding voice) who is calling?, hi Steve this is your cousin John., Hi John it’s so good to hear from you. Sorry about the mean sounding voice. I use that to scare off the telemarketers. How are you doing?.. Next call: ring, hello, hi Steve this is Dan at Minute Lube (I was waiting for this call). Your car is ready now, thanks Dan I’ll come down to get it. Next call: ring, hello, hello (formal sounding voice) I am with…, click-I hung up never knowing nor caring who they were with. Next call: ring, hello, Hi Steve (natural friendly sounding voice) this is Fred, Hi Fred (I use a natural friendly sounding voice also) where do I know you from Fred?, I am with (formal sounding voice)…, click-I hung up. If Fred had said “you bought a car from me a few years ago, remember?” I might have listened to his pitch and might have even went down to his car lot if I was in the market to buy a new car. If I wasn’t in the market for a new car, I might have added him to my personal phone list (a friendly caller) and invited him to stay in touch if that business relationship was good to begin with.
It’s all about relationships. Any minimum-wage idiot with access to their employer’s phone system can try to sell you something. You want to cut them off before they can get even their name or who they are with out.
This method is extremely successful at keeping away sales people and scammers while letting calls that I want to receive get to me. I never have to hide who I am on my outgoing calls. I never have to be nice to or waste time on people who want to get something from me. Just hit the [END] button when you realize that someone is trying to waste your time to get something from you. You don’t need to be polite or to wait to say “no thank you” in that case. Because they will usually keep talking until you hang up on them. Just reduce your stress level and save yourself some time by hanging up before they have an opportunity to try to keep you engaged in the call. Also, anyone who spoofs their number gets hung up on as well as soon as I realize what they’ve done. Any relationship that involves their deceiving me upon their initial introduction to me is going to be bad for me if I choose to deal with them. So if you set your boundaries properly, you never have to be anonymous in your day to day interactions with other people.
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I need to call parents of pupils for evaluations and things. My school does not have landlines, nor do they provide us with school cell phones.
I definitely do not want these parents calling my private number, specially not in the evenings or weekends.
It’s that simple.
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Not at all. You might be calling someone, attempting to get information that will allow you to finalise the decision as to whether you do or don’t want to have business with them - and what you don’t want is endless calls back as they try to persuade you to have business with them (e.g. they want to complete the sale when you have decided that this particular business is not right for you).
Many businesses intentionally withhold information from their web site, attempting to force you to call them i.e. increase the level of engagement and interaction.
Yes, I appreciate that you can just block or ignore any business that is calling you back after you called them but suppressing the CLI pre-empts that problem and solution.
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In the case of a school teacher who doesn’t want parents of their students calling them back, you have two choices that I am aware of. 1.) Put Google voice on your smart phone. You will get one free Google voice phone number when you sign up. It is very easy to decide which phone number to call from (your Google vice number or your phone’s actual number) to call from before placing calls. Configure Google voice not to accept incoming calls. Parents will get an endless ring when they call you back. Your phone will not ring. 2.) Buy a $40 voip box (I use Grandstream) and use voip.ms to make your outgoing calls from an analog phone (it goes through your router). Voip.ms charges you less than a penny per minute. If you don’t want anyone calling you back, then do not pay 85 cents per month for a dial-in number. You can call out but no one can call you back. You use an old style phone that feels and acts like a landline (including a normal dial tone). Buy a two-line phone and make your calls to parents from line 2.
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Or use a payphone.
As a youg kid, I learned that you could bend open a paper clip and stick one end of it in to the holes in the microphone end of the handset on a pay phone and push it in until it touches the metal part of the microphone. Then touch the other end of the paperclip to the metal coin box of the phone. This would cause a clicking sound in the ear piece. Then you could dial a free phone call. I don’t know if that still works. It worked in the early 1970s. Twenty years later it was the early 1990s. I had a friend who was re-programming the ee-proms in bag phones (a cell phone in a bag with a shoulder strap because that phone was heavy). You could make anonymous cellular phone calls with those phones and never got a phone bill. That was a pretty good business for him until one day he sold one to an under cover FBI agent and ended up in prison. It’s amazing how the phone system has changed over the last fifty years. Phone calls are almost free now.
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Your comment makes me even stronger in my believe better not to share my number and call anonymously.
Thank you.
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