Saturday, January 12, 2013

Silencing the Phone

Annoying.  Plain and simple. UNA phone calls are never welcome.  What is UNA?   This is kinda a joke in our family - They are phone calls where the number or the name of the caller are Unavailable, so we call them UNA. 

 Do you ever get them? Pretty sure you do at some point.  When we had a land line, we got them almost daily.  Caller ID and the National Do Not Call Registry,   helped some, but after we dropped our landline a few years ago, we finally had some peace.

This last year, our family started getting UNA calls again, and yesterday, after getting close to 15 calls from one telemarketer in CA, I had enough.  Did what many frustrated people do  - I googled a solution for iPhone users.  Since I'm not able to block a phone number from my cell phone, but have to go through our provider and PAY to have it blocked, I was not willing to do that yet. 

Some of the suggestions 
  1. get an app to block it
  2. Contact your own cell phone provider.
  3. Contact the Federal Trade Commission.
  4.  Use call block.with our service it's $4 something a month for this service. and you can add up to 6-8 numbers. 
  5. Sign up for Google Voice and tie in the phone number in question. I cannot recommend this, as I've not tried this method.  Am not sure how it even works.
  6. Get a "silent" ringtone. This is what I did.  Following directions given at the following site:  How To Create a Silent Ringtone for your iPhone by David Hartfield  The least expensive solution after doing the "Do Not Call Registry".  I even put my phone on no vibrate as well for this number. So when they call, phone rings silently, no vibration to irritate me, and it is so much painless   Once they finally stop calling, I can delete their number and save the ring tone for the next telemarketer! 

    How have you handled this types of phone call?  I'd REALLY love to know how! 



1 comment:

GLENDA CHILDERS said...

Good idea ... I don't like uninvited phone calls either.

Fondly,
Glenda