Saturday, December 01, 2018

People who are reluctant to call landlines

As I've blogged about before, I prefer having a landline to using a cell phone for everything.

However, in recent years, I've noticed that people (including business relationships) are reluctant to call my landline, even when I explicitly tell them to.

For example, I will say "Please put in my file that my landline is the preferred number. I work from home so I'm at that number 23 hours a day, and I live alone so it is a private number. If I'm not at home, I'm not equipped to check my calendar or schedule an appointment or anything, so if you call my cell phone I'll just have to call you back anyway." 

And they still call the cellphone.

I do try to disincentivize calling the cellphone.  I don't answer the cellphone when I'm at home, sometimes even turning it off when I'm home (depending on whether I'm open to receiving texts at that moment). I don't answer it when I'm out and about for calls that aren't going to be immediately relevant (for example, I'll answer if it's the person I'm meeting or someone who might be trying to get in touch with me for emergency reasons, but I won't answer a call confirming a dentist appointment or wanting to discuss renewing my mortgage.)  If I do answer and it's something that would better go to the landline, I'll say "I'm not at home right now and not able to address this at the moment.  I'll call you back when I'm at home."  (And then, when I do call back, I tell them to call my landline next time.)  If they leave a message, I don't call them back until I'm at home.  (If they call the cellphone while I'm at home and leave a message, but don't subsequently try the landline, I don't even check the messages until I've gone out and returned back home.)

And I do try to incentivize calling the landline by always answering immediately when the call display shows a number that does have business calling me, and always returning calls immediately.

But people still call the cellphone.

I've even stopped giving out my cellphone number unless strictly relevant, but some people still have it in their records from back when I would blithely fill out every field of a contact form without regard for consequences, and some people do have a reason to be able to contact me by cell in emergencies. (For example, work needs to be able to reach me in case I disappear off the face of the earth, sometimes I give people my phone number if we have an appointment in an place I'm not familiar with, in case I get lost or delayed or something.) And when I do give it out, I tell them "You can use this if I don't show up at my appointment, but normally it's the worst possible way to reach me."

And they still call the cellphone.

I totally understand why some individuals might find not having a landline more convenient for their own purposes, but I'm rather baffled by the fact that they avoid calling someone else's landline even when explicitly instructed to do so.

Somehow, their baggage about calling a landline seems to outweigh my explicitly stated instructions about which number to call, plus all the cumulative empirical evidence about which number I'll answer first and which voicemail I'll respond to most quickly.

And what makes it especially weird is I get the vibe that people who are reluctant to call landlines seem to feel that doing so is rude.  Even though calling my cell increases the likelihood of interrupting me at a bad time. If I'm not at home, I am almost certainly in the middle of something and almost certainly do not have privacy.  If I am at home, I may or may not be in the middle of doing something and almost certainly do have privacy.

Again, I understand why some individuals might feel that calling in general might be rude - society as a whole certain seems to have moved towards texting or emailing to confirm it's a good time to call rather than calling cold - but this isn't what's happening here.  What's happening here is I'm getting a call without warning that requires thought or action or decision-making or scheduling on my part, and callers are deliberately choosing the number that's most likely to reach me at a bad time, despite my clear instructions to use the other number.

Baffling.

2 comments:

laura k said...

This is one of the reasons I gave up my home phone and went to cell-only. No one would call it, no matter what I did.

The aspect of this that I found most baffling was the people -- at a doctor's office or the vet clinic -- who asked, "What's the best number to reach you?" but still called the cell, despite their question and my answer.

impudent strumpet said...

My inner conspiracy theorist thinks there's some kind of conspiracy by cell phone providers to make people not call landlines. Can't figure out how they're doing it though.