This week I read an amusing thread elsenet. The prompt was, "I know it's a spam call when...." My favorite entry was:
I know it's a spam call when...
My phone rings
That got me thinking, yeah, almost every single call I get anymore is a spam call!
Of course, it's not quite as simple as all phone calls = spam. Not for me, anyway. I still get a few calls from actual people I want to talk to.
- My mother calls a few times a year. I don't think she will ever send a text or email. She's barely learned to use an ATM, and I proclaimed ATMs dead several years ago.
- Hawk and I phone each other while we're at work a handful of times a week. Most of the time we text; we call when we need to discuss something that's not efficiently done in text and can't wait until we're home together.
- A handful of times a year my oldest sister calls, or I call her. Again, usually we text. We talk on the phone about once a month to catch up more fully.
...And that's about it!
Note what's not on this list. Work-related calls. That's a little surprising because my cell phone is my work phone. It's the only phone number on my business card (not that I've handed out one of those in nearly a year now!) and the only number in my email signature. But that said, I haven't had a customer call me in... gosh, at least 5 years. Colleagues only call my phone when I ask them to, in lieu of calling me via Slack or using Google Meet or Zoom.
So, because I do receive occasional real calls I do what I think most of us do: I look at the Caller ID. If it's a number my phone recognizes as belonging to someone in my contacts list, I see their name and I answer. Anything else, I silence it and go back to whatever I was doing before.
How do you know when a call is spam?
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