Watch the 19 second video. He didn't take out his phone, it was a notification on his smartwatch.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4in1AUemxqM&frags=pl%2Cwn [1] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/why-was-nancy-pelo...

https://www.indy100.com/article/hilary-clinton-facetime-call...

I've made peace with the notion that if a family member dies I will find out a few days later, but I refuse to get calls from these people that honestly should have their eyes plucked out.

And what would be the benefit to ATT to stage this?

Back to the point, I think it was staged, but more to illustrate the CEO also is getting robocalled. If he sat up there and just said it, who wouldn't roll their eyes and say "yeah sure". Without being in the right place, recording at the right time, there is literally no way to convey "I'm having this problem too", even then, there'd be skeptics.

More generally, what chances of a call being an emergency contact versus a spamming robo-call are people willing to accept? If I had a hemophiliac child, or an at-risk geriatric parent, I would be far more willing to accept all calls. Since I do not, I use a robo-call blocking service (Nomorobo, but any of several would do, if/until Stir/Shaken works.)

With the scenario experienced, as I said, I don't really care about robocalls. There's that old saying about "If it won't matter in 5 years, don't spend more than 5 minutes getting angry about it". With that in mind, I just sort of filter out the annoyance. Yes, robocalls are annoying, but again, I prefer it over rhacker's alternative of finding out about important things later.

There were posts on here months ago about how Facebook had a pretty aggressive notification process for users that started leaving the service. I'd stopped posting on there shortly after the accident because my posts became more about my family's status - if felt cheap/dirty/not-right to then post about a meme or something silly. The notifications annoyed me, so I disabled social network notifications and generally "stopped caring" about these types of minor annoyances overall.

My point is that I agree that robocalls are annoying and, sure, I hope someone gets fed up enough to attempt to fix them, but in the grand scheme of my life and happiness, eh. If it happens, it happens, if it doesn't, it doesn't.

If you’re not required to be on call for reason or the other, I can only recommend this approach. No wasted time with robo calls and also puts some humility into your hot shot boss that thinks it’s ok to try to call you about whatever at 1045pm. ;)

If enough people waste their time, then it should become a less profitable strategy.

I am wondering if robocallers rate phone numbers based on their interactions and possibly share that data...

The eye-plucking, though, that I'm totally okay with.

1. The CEO was being inattentive and discourteous to the interviewer and the entire live audience, by not silencing or ignoring incoming call notifications from every source prior to taking the stage.

2. The call notification was intentionally staged to occur during the interview.

Either way, it does not reflect well upon AT&T, in my opinion. A live interview is a performance, of sorts, and the pre-performance preparations were either incompetently negligent, or cynically manipulative.

Source: https://readsludge.com/2018/06/11/today-net-neutrality-offic...

"Can you imagine?! Our CEO got a call that appeared to be from his golf buddy, so he interrupted some interview. Only, and here's the amazing part, it wasn't actually from his golf buddy! It turns out that some evil hackers have subverted the strong security of SS7 to place calls that appear to be from phone numbers assigned to other parties! We can fix this if we get a $1 payment from the VOIP provider every time we terminate a VOIP call."

That's nice, but so what?

For comparison, actual famous people have been interrupted by telephone calls during the taped (before an audience) panel news/comedy show "Have I Got News For You?" all the time. Real people. Real telephone calls. It happens because a certain type of person when you say "Make sure your phone is off" does not in fact make sure their phone is off, why should they, it's fine, right? And then it rings. Embarrassing.

I assume in most cases they just edit it out of the show but if the reaction is especially amusing or they refer back to it in later parts of the show it's easier to leave it in. Because it's a show with actual famous people rather than "real" people there's not really an option to e.g. take their phone away. Who would agree to that if they're famous? "Are you claiming I'm too stupid to turn it off?" Oops.

And no, what happens isn't that people like CEOs are constantly in phone calls. They have someone in the middle, a Personal Assistant, paid to take those calls without wasting their time on frivolities. "Hello, Mr Person's office? No I'm afraid he's busy right now, what did you want to talk to him about?". He may or may not be busy, it's just easier to always say that.

Every person they give their number to is another person who might waste their time, so most people get the PA's number.

CSPAN is actual TV.

I doesn't happen very often -- but it does happen.