Have you ever hit this scenario? The phone rings, and you answer it. You say "hello?" (or if you like to mess with people you say "Gut?" or "¿Hola?"). Then, a recorded voice comes on with "Please hold for an impor". This is cut off in the middle and music starts playing. After 20 seconds or so, someone comes on and says "Hello?". This one happened to me yesterday. I actually did hold the 20 seconds this time. I wanted to see what was so important to ME that I would think was worth the holding time, but so unimportant to them that they would hire a machine to call me and not bother connecting me to an agent for 20 seconds. (I'm on the "do not call list" by the way, so this had to be one of those millions of "exempt" groups like politicians, insurance, your credit card company, or anyone from whom you've ever bought something). Anyway, I hung up as soon as the person said "Hello?". I'm pretty sure it was Sears trying to get me to buy an extended warranty on some product I bought from them a couple of years ago. I think they got the priority wrong though: the message was important - but only to them, not to me.
The experience was similar to the endless polictical messages from the most recent elections although most of those were just recordings.
This all makes me think I need a new toy to combat this new extended method of wasting my time. I need (gasp) a new "call screening answering machine". Somehow, this new machine needs to not even allow my phone to ring until it has vetted the call. If it is one of these recordings the machine would pick up, detect the irrelevant call type, hang up, and I would never even need to know the phone rang. If it was a person, they would have to prove to the machine that their call should be routed to me. If it was someone I know, this could be very simple (I don't know, voice reco, something). If it was someone I don't know, I'd want this to be more difficult. Sure, build in the "right stuff" to cause real calls from emergency services type things to get through with no delay while still blocking the policeman's fund and the fireman's ball. Sorry guys, I gave at the office.
So what do you think? We've got spam filters for email. Who's down with a bozo filter for the real phone?
Posted
Nov 27 2005, 01:11 PM
by
Jerry
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