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Friday, September 19, 2008

Ward Off Unwanted Callers (Without Sounding Rude)

The mobile phone is both a boon and a bane. While it allows you to be in touch all the time, it also keeps you within the reach of people that you wouldn't like to talk to - telecallers, irritiating relatives or friends, nagging wife/husband or girlfriend/boyfriend, the boss or other colleagues (while you are busy with your wife/husband or girlfriend/boyfriend), crank callers, persistent wrong numbers... you can keep on adding to the list.

Some mobile operators provide a service to block unwanted callers, but many users prefer not do so because you can't block your boss' number. It's just that there are times you wish he/she hadn't called (because you have already overshot the deadline and are still thinking of a good enough excuse). Or that you cannot afford to offend some people even if you didn't want to talk to them. And the National Do Not Call Registry cannot rescue you from your angry girlfriend's phone call (NDNCR is not much effective anyways)

This simple trick might not actually prevent unwanted callers from calling you, but would irritate them (without offending) to stop calling for a while.

This is somewhat similar to the old ploy where you yell from one end, "I can't hear you...". But you tend to exert some energy in the lying effort. Here they cannot hear you and would do all the yelling, while you relax and continue to do whatever you were doing.

Steps:

1. Receive the call. If you can avoid not answering the call this trick isn't for you.

2. Converse for a few seconds (this is optional) to show that you aren't avoiding them.

3. Press the mute option, your end will go silent while the caller would believe this as a network problem (as it often happens in normal circumstances), will yell for a while and then hang up.

4. Follow the same steps if the caller calls again. He/she will get frustrated soon and would stop bothering you for a while.

In case your phone doesn't have the mute option, use your thumb to muffle the microphone.

And don't hold me responsible if anything goes wrong.

1 Comment:

Anonymous said...

Valuable. Thank you!