By pure, ridiculous serendipity, I found a way to almost bring a stop to phone solicitor calls, a major nuisance for dinosaurs who wish to hang onto their land lines. As we know, the National Do-Not-Call List does nothing to discourage phone solicitors, and playing mind games on the creeps just seems to egg them on. They’ve found a way to outsmart the formerly effective Telezapper, and the new analogues to that technology come out of Great Britain and so work less than optimally in the US. A few weeks ago, though, by way of asking the political hucksters to quit invading my private space, I recorded a new phone message that was altogether too long-winded. It goes on and on and ON all the way to the end of the available recording space.
It annoys the friendly caller as much you might imagine, alas, but it does have one surprisingly delightful unintended consequence.
Videlicet: It appears that automated robocallers, whether they deliver recorded messages or whether they have some trained cockroach on the other end, are programmed to hang up after a certain period of jabber.
Yesh. Thanks to Caller ID, I never pick up the phone unless I recognize the caller. So I don’t pick up until the voicemail greeting ends and a real person starts to speak.
After I engaged the byzantine phone message, I noticed the incoming nuisance calls all hung up at EXACTLY the same place in the recorded greeting. They’d shut off right at a specific word. Most of them canceled without even trying to leave a message.
Few robo-calls start babbling as soon as the line opens, for the obvious reason that if they start yakking while your voicemail greeting is running, you’re going to miss some of their golden words. So if they detect a recorded message, they stay silent for a short time — probably the length of a typical voicemail greeting. If they don’t get a person at that point, they disconnect.
Think of that….
This accidental strategy instantly stopped the political messages, because those have humans at the end and they don’t want to listen to that stuff again. It stopped almost all of the robo-calling business and scammer solicitations, because their auto-hangup never gets past the automatic hang-up point.
Just now, the only recurring nuisance calls are the ones coming from some outfit that Caller ID identifies as “UTILITY.” I assume that’s the scam where they threaten you with cutting off your power and water unless you pay up right this instant, but I don’t know because of course I’ve never talked to them. These people are extremely persistent. They have a way of making your phone emit a busy signal, which signals their system to automatically redial. So whenever one call comes in from this bunch, two more will follow, one from the same number and then another from a spoofed number.
That’s annoying, but it’s sure better than the vast quantity of incoming annoyances that slammed into my phone before the Endless Greeting went live.
If you have a home-based business, it’s pretty easy to make an Endless Greeting. Just pitch the business until you run out of talking time. Mine starts with “You have reached The Copyeditor’s Desk, Incorporated…” (Five syllables in that last word! Drag it out!!). Then it delivers the corporate motto. Then in goes on to describe all the wonderful things we can do, of which we have a-plenty. Then it says “If you would like to discuss a book publishing project, please leave word…” and “If you would like to [blah blah blah],” each time giving rather obvious instructions to leave an effing message.
It’s unkind to friends and business associates. But it does work on most of the phone nuisances. And it’s free. And it’s easy. No dollars flying out the window. No time wasted figuring out complicated programming instructions. No confusion over British vs. US phone system functions. Very nice.
Just talk the ba*tards down.
e several thousand dollars…since 1990. It still makes one or two hundred bucks a year. How many lattes would that buy? Anybody?