Spam Calls

I assume your life does not deserve to be periodically interrupted by badly configured machine calls.

Some time ago programmers were presented with a way to automate calls to a zillion phones, instantly.

The service could call you. The service would inform the programmer if the call was answered. The service could play a programmed message. The service could listen to your answer. The service could process your answer. The service could kindly say thanks and/or goodbye.

At least here in Brazil (bad?) programmers usually would only use the first skill offered by the service:

Call you (and a zillion other phones, instantly).

Without any message.

They would argue that the “first one hundred answered calls” would be transferred to human sales attendants.

But what about the other one zillion less 100 calls? They would receive nothing:

Not a good morning, even less a good bye. Silence. An instant hang down.

Is this what we are? Or what salespeople are?

Efficient to the point of sell or return silence?

This probably is not correct, while we’re still humans, not robots. We like to know who’s talking, about what, preferably with kind begins and ends of conversation.

Salespeople have beautiful CRM forms and charts to fill. There usually are $$ marks at the end of the “funnel”. They might “not have time” to say “good bye” or “thanks”. Or do not want to pay more for a better educated programmer. If 1% of one zillion calls gets answered and “converts”, salespeople will have 1% of one zillion “money” added to their beautiful salesforce-or-similar charts.

Why would they need to say “good morning” or “good bye”?

We wouldn’t even be able to guess who the call were from (they assume).

So these kind of circumstances of our world might end up ringing your phone, and every gadget you might have, spreading lots of silence and hanging downs, without a word.

After all, aren’t we all, a possibility of one more $ in a salesforce beautiful chart somewhere, everywhere? For lots of jobs, that's what we are. Why care to thanks?

So we need to deal with this our world ourselves.

In time, I have a trick to share.

There is a nice trick to bury this kind of salesperson/company/robot/bad programmer so they do not enter the beautiful flow of your very personal day.

The recipe is:

You receive a silent/bad educated/bad machine call.

You save the phone number (trust me on this):

If it still does not exist, create a “A Block These” entry in your agenda.The “A” helps let this entry stay at the top of your contacts list.The rest of the name can be whatever you wish.

Save the number inside the “A Block These” contact.

Now tell your phone to block all the numbers from the “A Block These” contact entry.

A new number calls? Add it & block all of them again.

Each time you add a new number to your “A Block These” contact, block all numbers again.

One by one your list of numbers will grow, till a point when the spam calls begin to almost disappear. Today, for instance, I have around 50 numbers carefully saved along three years. And it works for me: usually, finally, I receive zero spam calls. Persistence is the key. Any day a big company will indeed buy ten more spammy phone numbers, that will successfully reach our phones. No problem! We’ll also add them to our “A Block These” contact, one by one. We have a richer list - at every new spammy attempt. So we can answer our phones fearless. So we can keep a high value at each of our ring sound.

This solution does not rely on any app.

So your precious blocked numbers data keeps yours, and only yours, forever.

It also does not use your phone’s own method of blocking calls.

So your precious blocked numbers data keeps synced even if you change your smartphone’s brand.

You only need to sync your contacts in the cloud.

This is mandatory not only for this to work across smartphones without the need of any app, but it is also a good way to keep your contacts list safe from a damage to your phone, in general.

I don’t know if you can appreciate the simplicity, but still permanence across phones, of this solution.

In any case, can we, humanity, imagine what would happen with the world if everyone knew how to do this?

Would sales people build better calling machines?

Sadly, we that know how to deal with spam are only a few.

So the world won’t change, only my life and, hopefully, yours.

Always: thanks for hearing.