I work from home, and as a consequence, am the sole living thing able to answer the house phone when it rings. Most of the time, it’s a complete waste of time. I get PPI calls, news of refunds, surprise revelations that I was in a car accident and of course, people phoning me up to tell me that they’ve detected errors on my computer (although they never actually know my name).
The situation is compounded by the fact that we’ve only had our new number for a couple of years, and it evidently used to belong to a man called Mr Kitchen. I tell them that I am not Mr Kitchen, yet they still try to sell me stuff anyway.
You know you can register with the Telephone Preference Service …it will either cut nuisance calls to a minimum or eliminate them entirely. We registered around 1998 and haven’t had any problems since.
haven’t even answered the landline or checked the messages in prob 2 years. I only like having one cos a) I’ve got a cool retro looking one & b) sometimes I need to ring my mobile phone to find out which seat cushion it’s hiding behind.
I’ve just stuck this new number on the TPS list. I seem to remember that being something of a winner on the old number, except we still used to get international chancers ring up occasionally.
I used to fuck with the few that got filtered too. The first question I usually asked the virus scammers was “what’s my name”. I let rip after that. At other times, I would pretend to comply and describe the contents of other websites. Invariably, I’d get to a point where either myself or one of my family gave the game away. The phone would be hung up amongst peals of laughter.
The ones that annoy me are when they phone me and then ask me to prove who I am. I once had my Mortgage provider ring up at 8am on a Saturday morning to discuss a new deal as mine was coming to an end. 8am on a saturday was bad enough, but then the mush on the line asked me to prove who I was with some security questions. The answer was something along the lines of “Poke it up your arse, you cheeky twat!” before hanging up. I like to think that it was recorded and used for lolz on narky customers in some training room somewhere.
We used to get loads of international numbers phoning about this, that or the other. TPS can only do so much. So we bought some BT phones (think they’re called 6560 or something like that). They’ll mute the ring for international or witheld numbers (you can choose which or both). Absolute god send working nights, can now sleep through the day.
It has the added bonus that it mutes the mother in law, as she witholds her number