My wife is very upset at the number of calls we get that either have no caller ID, or some innocuous title (like, Private Number). Then, when she answers, it's almost always a telemarketer or robocall. I tell her she needn't answer, that that's what the answering machine part of the phone is for, but it seems to be instinctual in females to answer.

It's annoying but a least she's learned that there's a new word for masking ID: "call laundering." It doesn't make her feel better but at least she now has a definitional word.

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but it seems to be instinctual in females to answer.

Nope. I never answer the phone unless it's someone I know. Yet, my husband runs to get it. However, that may because I have always hated the phone, even as a teenager. Imagine how happy I was when texting and emailing became a way of life. I love writing an email so much more than making the call. Interestingly, though, there are those at my work who will only call people still.

I love "call laundering."

This is one of the great annoyances of the modern world. I never could get it through to my father that he didn't need to answer calls if he didn't recognise the caller ID.

The silent calls upset him but worse were the ones where an actual person was on the line because even if he recognised it for what it was he came from a generation that thought hanging up on anyone, no matter who, was bad manners, so he would engage them in conversation.

I tried endlessly to find ways to block these calls and was told by my phone company repeatedly that it was "impossible".
The calls usually originated overseas and often showed up as "number withheld" or "number unavailable". Occasionally they had a spoofed UK number,only identifiable because it usually had one digit too many to be genuine. Sometimes they showed up as a number and a five minute Google inevitably revealed tens of thousands of complaints about them. Complaints that had all presumably been "impossible" to deal with.

The truth of the matter is that it would be trivially simple, technologically speaking, to block these calls either at the switchboard or by building a call-blocker facility into the phone but the telecoms companies make a lot of money from them and so they are de-incentivised to deal with them.
Until some brave politician takes the bull by the horns and legislates that call-blocking MUST be made available to all phone-users, they aren't going to do anything.

And for a language related aside

when I typed de-incentivised it was underlined by the spell-checker in spite of being a perfectly good word and the suggested alternatives were

DE-incentivised
De-incentivised
d-incentivised
ed-incentivised

and

e-incentivised

all of which have now ALSO been highlighted as wrong

I'm like Kalleh in that I dislike answering the telephone. I'd much rather send an email or text. At work calls have dropped since we started using MS Office Communicator which allows (among other things) text chat.

When you think about it, a phone is an incredibly rude machine. It sits on your desk or in your pocket and every now and then screams "Answer me!" with no consideration of what you happen to be doing. If someone came to your office and acted in that way a lot of people would call security.

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a phone is an incredibly rude machine. It sits on your desk or in your pocket and every now and then screams "Answer me!"

My sentiments exactly! I treasure caller ID.

I was momentarily taken aback a couple of yrs ago when I'd failed to pick up my French cousin's overseas calls (which show up as "unknown"). On 2nd thought I decided if he was too cheap to leave a brief message, tough!

I found this, which is not the story I wanted but it's still funny.

I remember a few years ago a telemarketing executive had his private number listed in a blog. He became incensed at the huge number of calls it generated, so he tried to get an injunction, claiming invasion of privacy. I hope he was laughed out of court.

Unfortunately my wife belongs to the same category as Bob's uncle. She cannot be curt or impolite to these invaders and will engage them in pleasant conversation until they realize they won't get anywhere and hang up on her.


I just hang up but wonder if that only gives them more time to bother other folks. Perhaps I, too, should engage them conversationally and maybe even give them hope for an order of some kind.

Father actually.
And it was , more that my dad was taken in by them than that he was employing a deliberate strategy.

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When you think about it, a phone is an incredibly rude machine.

Precisely. People can call you at the most inconvenient times. If you answer it, you are inconvenienced. If you don't answer it and then call the caller back, then you are calling him at an inconvenient time for him. To me it's a lose-lose situation. However, email/texts can be written and answered when convenient.