D'oh! Running late ...

We have a landline, which means we get a lot of junk and spam calls despite being on the Do Not Call registry.

This is not a reason to give up the landline, because I get junk calls on my cell phone too. Most of the latter are in Chinese and appear to be live persons. The last one to call when I had the phone on called three times before registering - whether understanding my English or not - my saying "You have the wrong number" and hanging up.

Many of the junk calls on the landline used to be live persons. I had good luck squashing them by telling political callers that we have a rule in this household: we don't vote for any candidate who calls us more than once. Another oddity was one caller who asked to speak to the homeowner. "They're not here," I said; "they're never here." "I don't understand," said the caller. I replied, "Have you ever heard of ... rentals?" And then hung up. But a lot of callers, whether live or recorded, are from police charities or "the department of medicare" or something, so I just say, whether live or recorded, "Wrong number" and hang up.

What I really hate is live callers who begin by giving their name but then saying, "How are you today?" This is a fine piece of social lubrication to begin a mutually-agreed upon business conversation between two people who each know why the other is there. It is not a good way to begin one where the party being asked is completely ignorant of who the caller is or what they want. I usually say something like "That's a strange question to call somebody up in order to ask them." Then they usually hang up.

However, I'm expanding my rules for hanging up immediately without saying anything.

I'd noticed that calls that turned out to be boiler-room salespeople always began with, after you picked up and said "Hello?" a little boing sound. I think this was to notify the boiler room switching equipment, which probably calls many numbers at once, that here was a live one, before transferring to a person, which always took a few seconds. So now when I hear that sound, I instantly hang up.

But now I'm getting a lot of calls without the boing in which the response to my saying "Hello?" is for the caller also to say "Hello?" Before I established that these were all recorded, I figured it was a boiler-room who had just been switched onto the line and who said this to verify they had a caller. So I would say, "No, you called me. The way this works is, I say hello, and then you tell me who you are and what you want." Then there follows a pause while the computer tries to figure out what kind of response this is. Then they give a name and launch into the prerecorded spiel.

So my new rule is: If the response to my saying "Hello?" is to also say "Hello?" I will hang up immediately. I may trip up some live callers with bad connections this way, but they'll probably call back, like that Chinese-speaker did. I just don't want to waste any more phone etiquette lessons on robots.