Fighting with my phone

If you have a cellphone — and just about everyone does — you’ve probably had to put up with innumerable attempts by scammers trying to steal your money: emails from Nigerian princes offering to share their wealth with you, telemarketers trying to sell you hot stock tips, text messages accusing you of failing to pay a toll on a highway you never drove.

For the past couple months I’ve been enduring callers telling me I have a $150,000 line of credit that’s already been approved, all I have to do is return their call. They leave messages, as many as six or eight a day, that fill up my voicemail. I’m not interested in their high-interest loan scams.

At first I tried to block the caller’s number. So then they’d send the messages coming from different phone numbers. There was no way I could block all the numbers.

I figured I’d just turn off voicemail, but it turns out you can’t do that from your phone. For some incomprehensible reason, you have to call your wireless provider.

I tried to call Verizon. We’ve been with them for probably 20 years. One of the big reasons we’ve stayed has been their excellent technical support. When we first signed with them and had any problem, we could call and a nice woman based here in the good old USA would always be able to solve the problem immediately.

Oh, for the good old days. When I tried to call Verizon last week, I couldn’t get a hold of a human being. I had to deal with the dreaded automated call system that is supposed to understand human speech but can’t. I pleaded without luck to transfer me to a live agent. I gave up after a half hour of trying. So much for the promise of artificial intelligence.

I finally headed out to the Storm Lake store where we bought our phones. They had human beings who quickly solved my problem.

It turns out Verizon has an app for that, so the guy at the store downloaded it to my phone and set it up. It’s simple: If a caller isn’t in the phone’s contact list, the app won’t allow the caller to leave a message on my voicemail.

In the week since, I haven’t had a single voicemail from a scammer, or from anyone else, for that matter. But that’s alright. Except for loan sharks, I rarely received voicemails before. If people wanted to get ahold of me they could call me at the office, where someone would take the message and put the note on my desk. It has worked fine for 50-plus years.

I not only don’t like to receive voicemails, I don’t like to leave them either. They’re too impersonal and imprecise. If I miss someone, it will show up on the call log and I will call them back if I recognize the number.

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