Grrr!! Grrr!! bloomin unwanted phone calls......WARNING RANTY!!!

[phantomnamechanger]

what's your most recent/most annoying one and how do we deal with them?

Just now, making pastry (homemade meat pie), just about finished the rubbing in phase. phone rings. I HAVE to pick up because its the time that DDs would ring if their school bus had not turned up. Also DS is at a sports club and may have got hurt.
But no, its someone offering me a free service on my dyson I DON'T HAVE A BLOODY DYSON & NEVER HAVE! I have lived here 14 years, there is no dyson registerd at this number in my name, she expressed surprise that their data as wrong and said "so what brand do you have instead then?" and I said "NOT INTERESTED, GOOD BYE"

cheeky sods, they are chancers and trying to sell me one. LEAVE ME ALONE.

Ah that's better!

[steam coming out of ears emoticon]

If it's a call for any household stuff just tell them you live in army barracks. They hang up on you! The mod have their own contractors and there's zero chance of them doing the double glazing/ boiler/ insulation etc.

The other day someone called 'John' called my father, possible from Mumbai, and my father told him that beginning a call with a blatant lie was not a good way to start.

Fairy, you're right. The nice man who called the other week to tell me my computer was infected because of viruses in my broadband was only trying to help, too. It's not his fault he couldn't remember the company I get my broadband from, even though he worked for them. We all have forgetful days!

I have to answer withheld numbers as DS2's social worker's number is withheld!

You can set up Truecall so that callers from withheld numbers have to record their name before the call is connected, when you pick up you hear the recording of them saying their name, if you you want to speak to the person you press 1 to connect them, otherwise just hang up.

Alternatively (probably no good for social worker but might be appropriate for friends and family calling from abroad/withheld numbers) you can give selected welcome callers a PIN so they can bypass the blocking processes.

I should add that most cold-callers do just hang-up when asked to record their name, so that process does reduce the number of times the phone rings.

Home insulation grants. I was steaming asparagus (which is really easy to over cook).

I'm afraid I told her to Fuck Off.

Truecall has immensely improved my life, but I did inadvertently answer one scammer call recently. Amazingly he was calling about a fictional call-bocking service that he claimed I had been paying £4 a month for! I knew it was nonsense so the call didn't last long enough to hear what his pitch was going to be.

The mind boggles that there are actually cold-callers/scammers targeting people because they are known not to want such calls.

Last week I got a new phone. Next day call from 'Blah' at Carphone Warehouse. I see you enquired about such'n'such and such ' N's uh phones yesterday.
Me

Hello, are you the homeowner
No, I'm from the bailiffs
click

Hello, I'm not trying to sell you anything
I've cleaned up all the blood, the police won't know
click

hello, I am from Microsoft
I'm from jupiter can you take me home
click

and if its any sort of automated, just leave it till they disconnect as for those few seconds they cannot hassle anybody gullible

My husband spent an hour talking to one the other night about putting on a conservatory. Told him he's love it etc. started making appointments, and so on. They were getting along so well til he gave the address to our third floor flat

I get ones offering to save me money if I switch gas suppliers. I live in rural middle of nowhere and miles from a gas main

Microsoft keep calling me about my computer. I don't own a fucking computer.
I may or may not have actually told one of the scam merchants to fuck off!

I had a spate of these from callers with Indian/Pakistani accents who could barely speak English. One of them phoned me back when I hung up and I definitely told him to f*off.

Someone called me this evening to tell me all about how I needed loft insulation under a government scheme (I know I don't, someone from the council came round and checked when this scheme was first announced, our insulation is fine!).

I was perfectly prepared to be polite and explain this, and then. He called me 'dear'. Twice. I told him not to be so patronising and put the phone down. He rang me back to complain about my 'attitude'!

I've been called back before by the Indian MS scammers and called a fucking bitch for leaving them on hold for 15 minutes. I hope it costs them lots of money to make these calls...

Oh yes I'd forgotten about the home improvement grants.

We have already done everything to our house so they're wasting their time. One lady rang apparently doing a survey. I specifically asked her if she worked for a double glazing company. Oh no dear, she trilled. She then proceeded to tell me that I could have a home improvement grant, and that for this week only they had a special deal with a local company and would I be interested in their special deal on special windows with this special comps I for one special week only?

I told her that I had specifically asked her if she was calling about windows and that she had said no and that she had lied to me and wasted my time. Then I said thanks but no thanks, I didn't want to be too rude, I suppose she had a job to do. Fucking blatantly lied to me though!

Oh yes I'd forgotten about the home improvement grants.

We have already done everything to our house so they're wasting their time. One lady rang apparently doing a survey. I specifically asked her if she worked for a double glazing company. Oh no dear, she trilled. She then proceeded to tell me that I could have a home improvement grant, and that for this week only they had a special deal with a local company and would I be interested in their special deal on special windows with this special company for one special week only?

I told her that I had specifically asked her if she was calling about windows and that she had said no and that she had lied to me and wasted my time. Then I said thanks but no thanks, I didn't want to be too rude, I suppose she had a job to do. Fucking blatantly lied to me though!

We registered with the TPS a few years ago, and it seemd to cut down on calls a little. Now though, they are coming through thick and fast and some days we get up to six in one day.
If it's not someone ringing about how we're entitled to a new boiler, it's market research, "Will only take a few minutes of your time to answer these questions!"
No. Feck off.
Or asking if I've ever worked in a loud factory. No. GO. AWAY.
I just hang up. If there's a pause between me saying "hello?" however brief then I automatically hang up as it's bound to be a cold caller pest.
Either that ot we unplug at the wall quite a lot. Which seems to either enrage or baffle parents. smile]

I've had loads and loads of the computer ones, off the same Indian sounding man.

I dread being rang by an Asian with a genuine reason. One day I'm going to swear at some poor lost delivery driver or other poor sod with a ligitimate reason to call.

I have complained repeatedly to TPS about unwanted sales calls and never had any sort of acknowledgement, not even an automated 'thanks for alerting us' email. They are so useless that I've often wondered if they actually exist at all They certainly aren't very effective.

How do you block numbers on an iphone?

I get the odd call on my mobile about reclaiming PPI - the thing is, I'm not even old enough to have been affected by the whole thing.

Them - "Blah blah PPI in 2004..."
Me - "Ah, yes, 2004 was a really big year for me!"
Them - "Great! Where were you working?"
Me - "A school."
Them - "Oh, cool! What were you doing there?"
Me - "Maths, Physics and French A-Levels, and losing my virginity."

The ones that really boil my blood are the ones I get at work. I'm the office manager for a funeral director, and the amount of people we get making unsolicited calls is insane - despite being on the CTPS.

It could be trying to change our energy supplier, offer us long-distance calls, or in one recent case, trying to flog us light-up signs for our office walls (from a company 10 minutes up the road).

Sometimes I'll shrug it off. Sometimes I'll start flogging them a funeral plan "because I don't think we need XYZ, but everyone's going to die at some point, so may as well sort it out while I have you on the phone!". On very rare occasions, I will lose my lovely demeanour, and begin a very serious sounding rant about respect for the dead, before launching a couple of carefully-chosen 4-letter words.

A captive audience is a many-splendoured thing.

I got the phone manual out when my mother was off colour and I was painting the kitchen ceiling, I got sick of coming down the ladder for "our records show". The first thing I did was set the ring tone so that callers in the address book had a different tune than random people, that meant that I didn't come down the ladder unless it was someone we knew. Once I'd got the manual out I realised that some of the other functions would be more useful against sales calls than our tps registration.

For anyone who has caller id and is looking to replace their phone, look for one with a call barring option and a night service. I have a Panasonic and it's good for cutting down unwanted callers. The people that ring with a number can go in the call barred list - when they ring again they hear the engaged tone and then get cut off. At night the phone only rings when it's a number in the handset's phone list, everyone else goes straight to the answer machine. The nights are really long around here......

Yanbu! This drives me insane.

I found out recently that you have to reregister for tps every so often - reregistering has definitely reduced the junk calls I get.

There's a legal statement you can get from bt I think which you can read out to cold callers giving them legal notice that they are in breach of xyz and will be fined by bt if they call you again. My Dad used to keep it by the phone to read out - they always hung up before he'd finished.

I get loads of the Microsoft ones claiming my computer is sending error messages, but they came up with a new variant this week. It turns out I'm due a refund on my software guarantee (which I don't have) as it was mis-sold. Naturally, they can't refund me via cheque or online bank transfer. Instead, to get the refund I would need to switch on my computer and give him access, which struck me as a rather unusual way to transfer money and sounded rather like a scam. He hung up rather quickly when I pointed this out!

I've also had the Dyson service one. We do at least have a Dyson but I can't say it's ever struck me as something to have serviced regularly!

Those microsoft ones caught people out wher I live there was a bit in the paper about it and the police ran accampaign

We are tps registered but I would agree recently it's increased significantly - we are getting 6+ a day. Even being polite and saying sorry not interested hasn't worked - I've been sworn at and hung up on.

I think I am going to go down a new tact and tell them my phone is being tapped by the secret service.