I am not a fan of phones at all and use one as little as possible so the robocalls are probably even more irritating to me than to most other people. One particular problem I have with them, besides the much repeated ringing is the way they use up the space on the answering machine with either silence or a very loud, obnoxious noise.

Now that, apparently, many people don’t answer the phone if they don’t recognize the caller, the phone companies allow them to use an entire city as their identification or your own phone number, presumably out of curiosity in the latter case and knowing someone in that city in the former.

I’ve long suspected that the phone companies are making money from all this nuisance calling. No evidence, just the knowledge that money rules much of life.

Exactly. I get a fair number of calls from first time callers that are actually people that I need to talk to. I can’t ignore those. But for me it is still not that many calls, compared to a business as described in the post.

None of those suggestions, which are widely known and practiced, have worked!

A pox upon all industries that don’t provide any service to the public but instead exist by parasitically wasting people’s time looking for suckers to separate from their money.

Dean, text, emails, etc are all great ways to communicate all of this as hoc situational information

Add to that well organized human phone tree, and we don’t need no stinking robocalls.

I totally agree.

Worse – mine come on my cell phone (which I thought was illegal, unless not commercial).

Mostly credit card offers and scams.

I don’t really know, because as soon as a computer starts talking, I hang up.

I support your plan 100%.

I get the same calls, and I feel similarly, but we’ve been through this before. Robocalls were already made illegal or avoidable, but the legislation got written in such a way that the ban was a joke. I am willing to jettison those good calls if they could all be gone, if necessary.

I’m just worried that the legislation would be written in such a way that the robocalls would continue if there is any loophole. Or, that the robocalls we are getting are actually illegal but unstoppable. If we bad all the calls, it might be possible to use a technological fix.

Here is an alternative solution that might sound crazy but that I’m pretty sure would work.If we need to get critical info from school, let’s buy 25$ cell phones that do only that. They would not use the standard subnetworks of cell phones, and would only be useful for communicating with the school.

It seems crazy to take a technology (smart phones) that can in theory do everything we need them to do, then not use them for an entire category of important information because robocalls can’t be stopped otherwise, but I’m willing to do it just to force the issue.

By the way, I’m not so sure those school call lists are not given to others. Are you certain of that?