Exactly. I’ve only just begun paying attention since things have shifted (for me, at least). Before if you weren’t a contact and didn’t leave a VM or text, I wasn’t even going to look.
Yeah, that hasn’t changed. As recent homeowners it’s a constant barrage of crap offering HELOC (from our own mortgage company!), gutter installations, window replacements and, of course, the ULINE encyclopedia every other month.
… get rid of Caller ID entirely?
For the great majority of the time people had phones there was no way to know who was calling other than picking up and saying hello
The extra step of looking at the number and thinking whether we really want to talk to that person right now put us on the slippery slope to where we are today, where even our loved ones are in the “nah maybe I’ll call back later” bucket
I don’t think it would change anything. Heck, back when it was tape answering machines, I would listen to the message being left before picking up.
… yes, that should also die
The only fancy feature that enhanced the functionality was call waiting, because we had to answer the call to use it
Call waiting was the exact opposite of “enhanced functionality”.
/still a bitter modem user
ETA: I think we’re always going to disagree. The phone serves at my pleasure, not me its. I will deal with it when I want, not when it rings.
Caller ID is a vital safety feature for marginalized people. When I was being cyberstalked and doxxed for something I wrote on my blog that a man didn’t like, caller ID was a lifesaver. It meant I could prevent confirming they had my number correct by not answering the call (since my voicemail is intentionally left to the anonymous default robot that reads out the number you dialed).
Caller ID is part of the solution, not the problem. The problem is the spoofing feature that they insist on keeping solely for the convenience of corporate customers.
You probably know, but the problem is PBXs, which are mostly cloud hosted nowadays,with a T1, and a lot more internal lines than there were physical lines, you explained a lot of the reasoning that went on in that case. There was also the cost of having a line, and keeping it up to date, etc, for each employee that businesses didn’t want, as admin with traditional telcos is… slow. Also, they charged more for each phone number, and so on, when they had you by the two pair.
Nowadays it’s all VOIP anyhow, so there’s no constraints, at least physically, to having a thousand lines share a number.
However, back in the noughties, I ran a little ISP, and I set up their entire VOIP infrastructure, and it was trivially easy to assign a single number to a single account, and ensure that they could only log in once, and only make 1 call at a time… I am fairly sure the tech exists to enforce a single number, or range of numbers, and not allow the caller to set the number. However, I can also imagine ignoring that capability can find you a decent amount of clients.
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
