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Peter Bhat Harkins
Voicemail
Robots and elderly relatives have finally driven me to extreme measures. My voicemail greeting is now this “you have reached a number that has been disconnected” recording repeated for sixty seconds as a multi-pronged attack on voicemail:
- The notes are the “intercept” special information tones indicating a line is disconnected and the robots should mark the number as dead.
- The words should confuse or bore humans enough to hang up.
- The length should prevent me from getting two-second empty voicemails from people hanging up too slowly.
(Unfortunately, my phone company doesn’t let me disable voicemail.)
A potential failure is that I want to continue doing business with a few companies that robocall me with notices (insurance, finance, utilities). If one of their robots flags my phone number as bad it might become a customer support hassle where they think they no longer have a valid phone number for me. I’ll edit in an update if this becomes a problem.
2018-06-15: Since this post I’ve only gotten one voicemail (from a relative who read this post). I now only get one spam call every six weeks or so. I wonder if that’s a spammer who tries random numbers without maintaining a database or new spammers entering the market and trying numbers for the first time, but I can’t see a way to effectively differentiate between the two cases and don’t particularly care.