When the phone rings at my house, everyone runs… away from it. I’ll hear cries of; “duct cleaning!”, or “charity!”, or “survey!”, or, you get the picture.
Last night, the phone rang, my son and his girlfriend were in the kitchen but wouldn’t answer it. I stopped what I was doing, ran upstairs during the last ring, answered the phone, out of breath and it’s for my son. I pass the phone to him. He’s not happy but takes it, listens for a few minutes, answers a few questions, hangs up and starts ranting and raving about insurance companies. I love it!
Fifteen minutes later, the phone rings again, this time he answers it… a miracle in itself. “Dad, it’s for you.” I stop what I was doing, he passes me the phone. I don’t mind talking on the phone, I do it all day long. The pitch for money starts and I cringe. After listening to how much they appreciated my support in the past and how much they’ll appreciate my support in the future, I finally let them down easy… I prefer to be charitable in person. I hang up and start ranting and raving about charities. He loves it.
I remember being a kid when the ring of a phone was a was like the starting shot at a race, the first one there won the chance to answer, to see who could possibly be calling… it was exciting, a mystery.
Today, there is no mystery, only more duct cleaning, carpet cleaning or someone looking for money. If you’re lucky, really lucky, it might be someone you actually want to talk to.
And that’s why I answer… for that one in a million call.
the dan blog 
Totally agree, however you left out the obligatory phising call claiming to be microsoft and that I have a issue with windows…..
Ha! I had that one a couple weeks ago. Funny story… I told the ‘Microsoft’ person that my family was entirely Apple. They still wanted all my information 🙂
Dan, we went through a period where we were getting that call at least once a week. Try to get the telco to stop them, but because it was an international call they claimed there was nothing they could do. In the end we made a game of it and see how quickly we could get them to hang up on us. From memory some of the lines we used were, getting them to talk me through connecting my DOS based PC to the internet (that call actually lasted a couple of minutes), thanking them for calling back about repairing the broken window out back, discussing with them that the aliens are everywhere spying on us, and asking them to confirm that they don’t work for the NSA.
As much fun as it was, in the end we only got away from the calls because we moved interstate and our current number has not made it on to there calling list. Hopefully it can stay that way.
Wow, that’s quit a bit worse than what we experienced. If you ever get your ducts cleaned though… watch out! LOL