In a way, this is a huge relief. I never listen to voice mails, so not having to be bothered by my phone ringing for something unimportant saves me a bit of time and anxiety.
Now I just have to worry about people I know, phone interviews, and debt collectors (who seem to be harassing me less often via phone these days).
I stopped using phone completely, period, even for known numbers. It's in permanent silence, no vibration, no checking mode. It took some time for friends to learn they have to use Skype or whatsapp to contact me, but after that I don't have to worry about spam and midnight calls anymore.
My final and unfortunate solution for this was to stop accepting phone calls altogether. Friends/relatives know to use Skype and IM, all important stuff goes to voicemail, everything else is on permanent mute and ignore. I wonder if it is the case for more and more people.
You can rest assured that my phones are well managed. As well as phones can possibly be managed. Their volumes are set to zero, they are muted and their ringtones are explicity set to silence on top of that.
Disabling calls altogether can't be done. You bet I looked for that knob. Calls are literally baked into the OS. I even asked the phone company to turn off calling. Nope. So I have to live with constant useless annoying notifications that some bot is trying to call me whenever I'm actively using my phone. Welp. At least I managed to turn off voice mail. That was an especially horrible advertising vector.
Only reason I even have active phone numbers is WhatsApp. Technically, I only need SMS for the verification codes. Explaining that to the phone company is futile though.
Anyway, this only fixes part of the problem. Every other person in my life carries a phone with them. Older folks even have landlines. All those phones ring. A lot.
I don't generally make a habit of "configurating" other people's phones, for obvious reasons. I've tried convince them. It didn't work. They're OK with being routinely woken up by useless phone calls every single day because someone somewhere might one day need to call them on that phone to relay important news or something. It has a visible, measurable impact on their quality of life but they refuse to get rid of the phone. I think that's incredibly inhumane but it can't be helped.
That's what I do. If I am expecting a call from a non-contact I just disable it for an hour. Everything else gets sent straight to voicemail after a 4-ring wait.
And the thing is: this is better than it used to be.
At least every single phone call doesn’t interrupt at the absolute highest level of priority and take over your screen entirely. Up until…iOS 14?…you didn’t really have a choice to not deal with an incoming call while using the phone: a call immediately took over.
Android has a similar feature in its Do Not Disturb mode. If you're not already in my address book, my phone simply does not ring. Everyone I need to hear from on a moment's notice is in there, and everyone else can leave a voicemail. It's maybe a bit sad that it's come to this, but the robocalls are rampant and this is the only solution that even puts a dent in the volume.
This is just ushering in the end of voice calling entirely. Not too much longer now.
Alternatively, one day Apple will add a service to prevent this in a simple way, turn it on by default, and overnight the entire industry will be dead.
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