Privacy

When Don and I switched over from Time Warner to AT&T service a few weeks ago, we ended up getting a new phone number. As soon as we got our new phone number, the solicitors were on us like flies to honey. It takes thirty days to process your information on the National Do Not Call Registry (which we promptly registered for) and in the mean time we were getting as many as 20 solicitations a day.

That was bad enough. Then yesterday, some girl started calling the house repeatedly asking for a guy named David, convinced that she spoke to him on our line a week ago and has been trying to reach him ever since. Although we explained to her that this is a new number and that we are the only ones that live here and that we have no idea who this person is, she has yet to get it through her thick skull. She continues to call back from a blocked phone number more than a dozen times by now hoping that David will answer the phone and immediately hangs up now when we answer it. The only thing I can think of is that she is a mentally deranged lunatic and this David guy her ex-boyfriend who we of course are hiding from her. What?!

So I called AT&T to find out what we can do about this and they came to the rescue with our new Privacy Manager phone service. Privacy Manager does not let unidentified callers through yoru line. Period. If someone calls from a blocked or unlisted phone number, our privacy manager picks up and explains to them that we do not accept unidentified calls. The caller either has to press a number to display their phone number or record a message saying who they are. Only then does our phone ring and it's not the caller directly, but the privacy manager who plays the message for us and asks us whether we would like to accept the call, reject the call, send them straight to voicemail, or option #4 (my favorite) if it is a solicitor we can play for them a prerecorded legal rejection notice instructing them to block our number from their registry or face a lawsuit! The service should be in effect by the end of the day. And although it normally costs a monthly fee of about $6.00 which I would have gladly paid, it turns out it's free with our phone package!

By the way, I'm also told that it directs out of area calls (which I'm hoping includes 800 numbers) through the privacy manager so if you are calling us from out of town, I apologize for the extra steps but please record a brief greeting and we look forward to accepting your call promptly! I'm sooooooooo excited to have control over our phone in our own house again. Is nice!