Silent call at 4.45 am. Grrrrrr......

I know you can opt to not answer the phone but then I always wonder if it is an emergency - especially in the night.

The calls that really annoy me are the ones that say ' Am I speaking to Mrs G.....' Mrs G had my number before me but that was 10 years ago!! I got one for Mrs G a few days ago. I told the caller that Mrs G hasn't had the number for 10 years & he then said 'Am I speaking to the current owner of Mrs G's address' which isn't my address.

I guess it's a way of getting round TPS but it's very annoying.

ginny, we do not get cold callers here thankfully, no one can find us but when living near Oxford on a typical housing estate I too would 'choose not to answer my door' when I could clearly see it was someone doing the rounds. Its my home, my front door I choose.....mind you I did think I was a bit odd and perhaps just a bit of a nutter....but am glad to see am not the only one.

Some 'Withheld' numbers a merely from Government depts or Hospital trusts or other large scale operations that do not want you to call back on anything other that the published number so I do not ignore those...its just the International ones.

With some telephone systems it is impossible NOT to withhold the number. Years ago I worked on a large holiday resort, part of my job was to call some of the guests and check if there was anything they needed, such as high chairs, stair gates etc. We had to dial "9" to get an outside line, and this resulted in the number I was calling from being withheld

Witheld numbers really annoy me too. If they don't want me to know who they are, why would I want to speak to them ? Now we do not answer them , if it is important they can leave a message.

HildaW It is strange how we feel we have to answer. The same is true of 'cold callers' at the front door. My friend could not believe I was not answering the door bell as I knew it was someone selling. 'But they can see you are in " she said as we were sitting in the lounge. Not a problem for me , I didn't ask them to call and I don't want to buy anything.

When I retired in 2008 we got rid of our landline and we now use only mobiles. My mobile (iPhone) is programmed to only ring audibly for numbers stored in my address book - for everything else it rings silently and I can choose whether to answer it or not.

Years ago when calling my mother the drill was to let it ring twice, then hang up and call again.

We use caller ID on our phones....anything that comes up 'International Unavailable' is ignored'. Also our phone allows us to have different ring tones for very close family ....so we know straight away if its one of the children. I also work on the premise that there is no law that states I HAVE to answer my phone......it will register any missed calls and there is also an answerphone for important messages. I think sometimes we are too polite or too deferential. Its a phone, merely a piece of equipment that enables communication.....not a call from a deity.

I had to unblock the overseas numbers because they were taken en masse and could not pick out the ones that I wanted to keep. My call blocker came with my BT 4500 (and 3 handsets) which is fairly new.

Oh I see, I think I may try that, thanks. I thought it would block my son overseas but I guess I can customise it.

www.truecall.co.uk/home.aspx

Here's one, there's a good video demo. There are others around, I think if you put "call blockers" into Google you should find a fair few, and a range of prices.

You put in the numbers you will accept calls from. If any other number calls, even if it's withheld, the machine answers for you and asks the caller to leave a message, you then get an alert, you can listen to the message and decide if you want to take the call. You can also use a function whereby if you decide you don't want to take the call now or ever the machine politely tells them to piss off!

The original thread about these had a link to a really good demo of the product. I'll have a bit of a hunt.

But how can you add a withheld number? That's the bit that so infuriates me.

Buy a callblocker they are worth every penny. They do what they say in the name. Come preprogrammed with 200 numbers and it's very easy to add more.